Scholars widely acknowledge that democratic political leaders seek public
support for their policy endeavors, particularly when conducting costly policies as in the
case of military interventions. A deeper understanding of the factors that affect public
support for military interventions is crucial to explaining more definitively the
determinants of foreign policy decisions regarding military interventions. However, most
studies in this area of research examine the public as an undifferentiated mass that reacts
uniformly to changes in the course of an intervention. In addition, scholars often
overlook the varying dynamics of public support across different phases of a military
intervention. Given these shortcomings in the literature, the objective of this dissertation
is to examine the formation of public support as a function of political information levels
and intervention stages.
This dissertation is important in both methodological and theoretical terms.
Methodologically, the major contribution of my dissertation is the adoption of a multimethod
approach that is almost non-existent in this line of research. By bringing together
a formal framework, experimentation, and statistical analyses of public opinion survey
data, I develop a more refined theory and attain more robust empirical results. Theoretically, the study challenges the dominant mode of research on military
interventions in which public opinion is treated as a homogenous mass. Specifically, I
explore how major factors related to public support for military interventions (such as
casualty rates) play different roles and weigh differently in their impact on the opinions of
politically informed versus less informed individuals across stages of an intervention.
The results of the experiments and survey data analyses demonstrate that
politically informed individuals express less support for a military intervention at the
starting (rally) phase of that intervention compared to the less informed. That said, as the
intervention proceeds and casualties are incurred, support of politically uninformed
individuals decreases at higher rates than does support of politically informed ones. In
other words, politically informed individuals demonstrate more stable levels of support
across intervention stages. In addition, both experimental and survey data analyses show
that policy-specific information is generally a more influential factor on public support for
military interventions compared to general political information.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-05-516 |
| Date | 2009 May 1900 |
| Creators | Sirin Villalobos, Cigdem |
| Contributors | Geva, Nehemia |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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