scholarly journals Presidential use of diversionary drone force and public support

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205316802110199
Author(s):  
Scott S. Boddery ◽  
Graig R. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Presidential Approval ◽  
Policy Success ◽  
High Reward ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact

During times of domestic turmoil, the use of force abroad becomes an appealing strategy to US presidents in hopes of diverting attention away from internal conditions and toward a foreign policy success. Weaponized drone technology presents a low cost and potentially high-reward option to embattled presidents. While generally covert operations, drone strikes are frequently reported in the media, making them a viable diversionary tool. To gauge whether drone strikes are in fact capable of diverting the public’s attention, we surveyed 1198 Americans and find that a successful drone strike increases presidential approval despite a weak and sagging economy, and the impact of diversionary drone use is significantly greater than that which accompanies traditional diversionary methods.

Explaining Public Support for the Use of Military Force: The Impact of Reference Point Framing and Prospective Decision Making

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor Perla
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Public Support ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article examines the determinants of public support for the use of military force. It puts forward a Framing Theory of Policy Objectives (FTPO), which contends that public support for military engagements depends on the public's perception of the policy's objective. However, it is difficult for the public to judge a policy's objective because they cannot directly observe a policy's true intention and influential political actors offer competing frames to define it. This framing contestation, carried out through the media, sets the public's decision-making reference point and determines whether the policy is perceived as seeking to avoid losses or to achieve gains. The FTPO predicts that support will increase when the public perceives policies as seeking to prevent losses and decrease when the public judges policies to be seeking gains. I operationalize and test the theory using content analysis of national news coverage and opinion polls of U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1980s. These framing effects are found to hold regardless of positive or negative valence of media coverage.

scholarly journals In the Wake of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter: The Plight of John Artis

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Rebekah Spaulding
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Secondary Character ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact

<p class="BodyA">In the summer of 1966 in Paterson, New Jersey, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis were arrested on suspicion of triple homicide. Tried and convicted the following year, Carter and Artis would spend almost twenty years in jail, despite evidence of witness tampering and police malfeasance. During and after their incarceration, Carter received an abundance of public support due to his famous boxing career, while Artis often went unnoticed as a secondary character by the media. By examining the details surrounding Carter and Artis’s wrongful imprisonment, it is clear to see the institutional racism and systematic criminalization of African Americans, as well as the impact of notoriety in criminal justice. While this case is undoubtedly a gross miscarriage of justice, it is the forgotten story of John Artis that shows the flaws of the criminal justice system and how society is told to remember its history.</p>

The Costs of Conflict and Support for the Use of Force: Accounting for Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Jared McDonald ◽  
James Igoe Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Military Action ◽  
Key Innovation ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
Attack Type

Abstract How do the costs of conflict influence public support for the use of force? Existing research finds that weapons that eliminate the possibility of military casualties, such as drones, increase popular support for engaging in conflict. We argue that this effect may be overstated because the choice of weapons technology is endogenous to conflict. Leaders may select to use drones in conflicts where the risk of harm to ground forces is especially high. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Walsh and Schulzke across three survey experiments. The key innovation in our experiments is that subjects are led to believe that the choice of attack type – drones or ground troops – is determined by weather conditions rather than strategic considerations. We find that support for military action does not differ across treatments in which subjects are told that the attack involves drone strikes or ground troops.

Audience Beliefs and International Organization Legitimacy

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 733-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence L. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
Presidential Approval ◽  
Strategic Information ◽  
Un Security Council

AbstractRecent work suggests that multilateral security institutions, such as the UN Security Council, can influence foreign policy through public opinion. According to this view, authorization can increase public support for foreign policy, freeing domestic constraints. Governments that feel constrained by public opinion may thus alter their foreign policies to garner external authorization. These claims challenge traditional realist views about the role of international organizations in security affairs, which tend to focus on direct enforcement mechanisms and neglect indirect channels of influence. To examine these claims, this article investigates the first link in this causal chain—the effect of institutional statements on public opinion. Strategic information arguments, as opposed to arguments about the symbolic legitimacy of specific organizations or the procedural importance of consultation, posit that the effect of institutional statements on public opinion is conditional on public perceptions of member states' interests. This article tests this conditional relationship in the context of changes in presidential approval surrounding military disputes, using a measure of preference distance between the United States and veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. Findings indicate that short-term changes in presidential approval surrounding the onset of military disputes in the United States between 1946 and 2001 have been significantly larger when accompanied by a positive resolution for a Security Council that is more distant in terms of foreign policy preferences. The article also discusses polling data during the 1990s and 2000s that support the strategic information perspective.

scholarly journals Teargas and Selfie Cams: Foreign Protests and Media in the Digital Age

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Naima Green-Riley ◽  
Dominika Kruszewska-Eduardo ◽  
Ze Fu
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Democracy Promotion ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Media Source ◽  
The Media ◽  
Effects Of Violence ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This study explores the impact of repression of foreign protests and the media source reporting the news upon American foreign policy preferences for democracy promotion abroad. We use two survey experiments featuring carefully edited video treatments to show that even short media clips presenting foreign protests as violently repressed increase American support for targeted sanctions against the hostile regime; however, these treatments alone do not inspire respondents to political action. Furthermore, we do not find evidence that mobile treatment magnifies the effects of violence.

scholarly journals Multilateralism and the Use of Force: Experimental Evidence on the Views of Foreign Policy Elites

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Busby ◽  
Craig Kafura ◽  
Jonathan Monten ◽  
Jordan Tama
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Military Force ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Policy Elites

AbstractInternational relations scholars have found that multilateral approval increases public support for the use of military force and have developed competing explanations for this phenomenon. However, this literature has given little attention to the attitudes of individuals who participate directly in the foreign policy process or shape foreign policy debates. In this research note, we administer a survey experiment to both a cross-section of US foreign policy elites and a nationally representative sample of the US public. We find that US foreign policy elites are more responsive to multilateral approval than the US public, with elites with direct foreign policy decision-making experience valuing it especially highly. These findings point to the importance of considering differences between elites and the public when investigating or theorizing about the impact of multilateral cooperation on domestic politics.

The impact of the fall 1997 debate about global warming on American public opinion

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon A. Krosnick ◽  
Allyson L. Holbrook ◽  
Penny S. Visser
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Media Campaign ◽  
National Surveys ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Issue Public ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

Although global warming has been the subject of some public discussion since the turn of the 20th Century, it was pushed into the national spotlight during the fall of 1997, when President Bill Clinton's administration instigated a campaign to build public support for the Kyoto treaty. To examine the effect of this campaign and the debate it sparked, we conducted two national surveys, one immediately before and the other immediately after the campaign. We addressed three questions: (1) What were Americans' beliefs and attitudes about global warming before the debate? (2) Did the debate catch the public's attention? and (3) Did the debate change people's beliefs and attitudes about global warming? We found that a majority of the American general public and of the global warming “issue public” endorsed the views advocated by President Clinton before the media campaign began. The debate did attract people's attention and strengthened the public's beliefs and attitudes. The debate produced almost no changes in public opinion when the nation's population is lumped together. But beneath this apparently calm surface, strong Democrats came to endorse the positions advocated by the Clinton administration, while strong Republicans were less inclined to endorse the administration's views.

scholarly journals Pussy Riot as agent provocateur: conspiracy theories and the media construction of nation in Putin's Russia

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-636 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya Yablokov
Keyword(s):  
Public Support ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Pussy Riot ◽  
Media Construction ◽  
Russian Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact

This article studies the impact of conspiracy theories on post-Soviet Russian nation-building through the analysis of how the Pussy Riot trial was constructed by the Russian media. Conspiracy theory as a phenomenon is defined as a populist tool for relocation of power among different political actors, which creates identities and boosts social cohesion. This interpretation of conspiracy theories helps investigate how the media constructed the image of Pussy Riot and their supporters as a conspiring subversive minority, which threatened the Russian nation. The ability of conspiracy theory for swift social mobilization helped the authorities to strengthen the public support of its policies and model the Russian nation as ethnically and religiously homogeneous.

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