Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

(RES-062-23-1952) as part of a project to investigate 'Foreign policy attitudes and support for war among the British public'. We gratefully acknowledge the support from both funders, and the guidance we received from colleagues in designing the surveys. The research in this article has been presented at the 2012 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association and at seminars at Nuffield College, the University of Essex and the University of Lancaster. In all cases, we thank participants for comments and suggestions. 2At the height of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, civilians risked being the forgotten casualties. They received much less attention from the same American media which give extensive and sympathetic coverage to the deaths, repatriation and funerals of military casualties (Althaus et al., 2014). They were downplayed by the same British leaders who solemnly read out tributes to fallen service personnel in Parliament. And military strategists in both countries favored a doctrine of air strikes which, despite advances in precision munitions, still risks foreign civilian lives in significant numbers in order to minimize the risks to their own troops.In more recent years, however, civilian casualties have begun to receive more attention. This is partly due to the strategic choice mentioned above: with action increasingly taken via unmanned drones, military casualties have become much rarer while civilian death tolls continue to mount. The need to protect civilians has also become central to the case for military action in a context like Syria (e.g. Landay et al., 2015;Wright, 2015), even if the risks to US and British military remain equally central to the case against intervention.Given the earlier imbalance, it is not surprising that civilian casualties were largely overlooked in research -much of it triggered by Iraq and Afghanistan -on the drivers of public support for war. Since military casualties were more conspicuous in public debate, it made sense that they would have a greater influence on citizens' reactions, and in turn that researchers would focus on military casualty aversion. Now that civilian casualties are becoming more prominent in media coverage of conflict, however, a question arises about public reactions. Would we expect reporting of foreign civilian deaths to have a dampening effect on public support for military action? Or did media and academic focus on military casualties reflect the public's own preoccupation with its own servicemen and women over foreign civilians? Answering this question would make both an empirical and a normative contribution. It would improve our understanding of the conditions under which citizens are prepared to support military action. It would also tell us whether support for force is systematically higher than it would be if civilian deaths become a more central presence in elite discussion and media coverage of military action. 3The scant existing evidence makes it hard to assess the strength of public reactions to civilian casualt...

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