This is obviously very substantively important topic under what conditions will the public support military force, and its important we understand and its important we push each other really hard to try and make the work as good as it can. The halflife for any social research is probably fairly short anyway. So its worth discussing it sort of with as much friendly enga engagement as we can. So its hard to understate the importance of John Muellers work in shaping this whole Research Agenda and what people look at. And the importance of casualties in shaping Public Opinion about war. I think sadly sort of inside the beltway policy community has misinterpreted some of his work. Largely the public will immediately oppose war once the body bags start coming home. Im not exactly sure thats what his work se, but that became the conventional view and oftentimes was attached to him. There are several real difficulties in studying how casualties affect Public Opinion. The main way that we study Public Opinion obviously is through surveys. And when we want to measure how the public is how they might be sensitive to casualties, one of the problems is that any given survey is typically conducted over a shr short window two, three, four days so that everybody who is called or interviewed for that survey in some capacity basically experiences the same number of casualties that the war has seen at that point. There arent dramatic, dramatic changes in casualty numbers that change from the first day of a survey to the third, fourth, or fifth day of a survey. So that leaves us unfortunately with several different ways to measure how sensitive public is to casualties. One, we can try and use aggregate data so that we can take overall poll results, support for a particular mission, a variety of different questions that we could use, and we could try and see how support may decrease over time as casualties increase. One problem with that is that thats perfectly correlated with time. Casualties unfortunately cant go down and time cant go backwards. So were stuck with always observing increasing casualties at the same time were observing increases in the amount of time of the conflict. Another approach is to ask people a variety of questions in a given survey, and this is what my coauthors and i do among other things, and then we use a question very similar to the one that john presented from the l. A. Times in 2002 in which how does the public respond to if you tell them, would you still support it if there were this many casualties . And so thats problematic because people may not be able to experience those casualties. They may not know under what conditions those casualties were experienced. One of the main criticisms that adam will make is that if we use this as our measure of war support and measuring sensitivity to casualties, that its very possible that that measure of measuring the ability to measure sensitivity to casualties is going to be indigenous to overall war support so its a different measure. The third approach is to use experiments, similar to this approach, and give people similarly worded questions about scenarios in which the United States might use force or other countries might use force and change the number of casualties involved and see how that changes support. But those end up having to be hypothetical missions and so we arent necessarily tied into realworld scenarios like what should the United States do in iraq right at this moment and how would the public respond. So we have a substantively important problem with a very difficult measurement problem. So the work ive done with chris and peter, and i keep mentioning them in the hopes that some of the hate mail that we will generate will go to them and not just to me, peter was on a different panel that was televised by cspan this morning. And he showed me the death threat email hes received since then. So, chris and peter, if you want to send a death threat, send it to them, not me. So the one of the really important themes of our work is the importance of success. We we argue that people are much more likely to support missions that will be successful. And that a consequence of this is that people are willing to tolerate even extremely large numbers of casualties for a successful mission. And are unwilling to tolerate even small numbers of casualties for missions that they think will not be successful. And so one of the things i think is particularly important about this is that the extent to which people Pay Attention to wars and conflicts that embedded in this is an assumption or that people are able to have some sense of whats going on about the world or how the progress of a war is proceeding. This is i think another major point of difference between my work and i think in particular adams work. In addition, we think this is perfectly consistent with an overall costs and benefits approach. One way to think about it is you have costs of war, you have benefits of war, and that we should probably discount the potential benefits of war by the probability of success. And so if the prospect of success is really, really low, then whatever benefits that there may be from winning a war have to be discounted by that low probability of success. And so some other work that ive done with other coauthors uses a famous in Political Science framework trying to measure the costs and benefits approach and we find that it works. So now to address some of the common critiques of our work. First is that our emphasis on the importance of perceptions of success is misguided because it relies on people being able to have unmediated knowledge of battlefield events, whats actually going on in the war. I think to a large extent this is a strong man argument. Theres nothing that we write that says that knowledge of the situation on the ground and conflict has to be unmediated or that it even necessarily has to be accurate. People can believe that a war will be successful and support it even when evidence on the ground may suggest that it wont be and vice versa. Another common critique is that success or perceptions of success are indoginous to support. People who already support a war think it will be successful, people who oppose a war think it will be unsuccessful. This is a perfectly reasonable critique of some of our crosssectional work, but we and others have shown in survey experiments where we systematically vary the likelihood of success in a mission, that we tell participants in our experiments that missions are likely to be more successful or less successful, and that those have very predictable effects in the extent to which people support the use of force. And another common critique of our work is that what if casualties are simply the metric of success that people look at, that they measure a war based on how many casualties there are . And if there are lots of casualties the war is inherently unsuccessful and if there are few casualties then the war is inherently successful . In the work that weve done, we find that there is little evidence that this is the primary metric that people look to towards success. It doesnt mean that it is never used, but its at a minimum not the primary metric that people use. So our core argument is that people are more willing to support missions when they think theyre going to be successful and that successful missions, people will tolerate even large numbers of casualties, and so unsuccessful missions, people will be opposed even when there are really small numbers of casualties. And so one of the other sort of competing theories out there, again, from adam, is that elite cues are really important in understanding public support. That the public responds to what elites tell them and that these fall largely on partisan or Group Identification lines. And i think that there are a few important arias where this theory could be pushed further and could be refined. Thats the friendly way of saying that i think that its wrong. As i know adam will come up with a friendly way to say that he thinks that i am wrong. Maybe not so friendly. We are friend when we are not doing Something Like the this. So one isnt a terribly strong theory of which cues people attend to or why. There are a number of cues out there that people could attend to. It doesnt sufficiently separate the persuasive arguments that elites make in terms of supporting or opposing war versus just who says it. It unfortunately doesnt explain democratic support for the iraq war before the iraq war very well in that there is majority opposition to the iraq war among democrats prior to the iraq war in 2002 and 2003, yet all leading democrats were they are for it or at least tacitly not against it. I think the most troubling aspect or the area that i would like to see pushed the most is that it doesnt tell us that much about elitelevel decisionmaking. So one of the nice things about theory of perceptions of success is that it also might give us some insight into how political elites and military planners think about war. It seems to me not unreasonable to think that those in the military would be resistant to missions that they think are and political leaders to missions they think are going to be unsuccessful and more supportive of missions they think are going to be successful, whereas an elite cue theory doesnt give us any potential insight into the main reasons why elites are suppo supporting or opposing particular missions and the use of force. And i have exceeded my allotted time already by about three minutes, and that felt super fast. All right. Thank you very much. [ applause ] great. Thank you. Great. Its great being here. Ive been on different panels through the years with both john and jason, so we have these kinds of back and forth. But its really nice, as jason said, we are generally friendly, and so this is good. Before i begin, i think were on cspan so if my kid are watching i want to say ahnd get your hands off each other. So lets start with a story, and this actually gets to something jason concluded with. We have two party, party a and party b. We wont call them what they are, but the party a is the party of the president , the president who at this moment is considering intervention in a foreign country, and party a is the opposition to the president , im sorry, making particular arguments. Again, were talking about the quality of the arguments here that jason was say, not just whos saying it but what theyre saying. Americans are going to be killed. Theyre going to come home in body bags and be killed in a war that congress has not declared. Second senator says im afraid we might be starting something here we cant get out of. Im afraid we might be here for years and years and years. By party b, the party of the president , expresses support for the president s position, saying we should have an intervention. I know some of my colleagues believe strongly that the administration has not articulated forcefully, consistently, and clearly, the missions and goals of this use of force, we cannot let these kinds of atrocities and humanitarian disasters continue if we have in our power to stop them. I believe its our duty to act. And as a scholar of Public Opinion, im very interested in how does the mass public respond to these kinds of contrary arguments. We can see generally the public falls behind their particular leaders. Question asked at the same time of this debate, considering everything, do you think the u. S. Did the right thing in getting involved in the military conflict . Do you think it was a mistake . Party a, 46 says its the right thing. Party b, party of the president , 66 say its the right thing. So this sounds very much like the rhetoric, the kinds of arguments that were marshalled before the iraq war and the reaction as john showed us this partisan split after the iraq war. But this isnt the iraq war. This is the spring of 1999, and were talking about kosovo, right so, the party of opposition of republicans, party b, the party supporting the president noted hawk paul wellstone. We have these kinds of armgts here marshalled in the iraq war and also marshalled in support of the kosovo intervention but by the different parties. So this gets at what jason was saying, yes, we need to consider in theory the kinds of arguments people are making, but the argument im making in my book is if we just look at who says it, not what they say or how they say it, just who is taking the position, whos supporting the war, whos opposing us, that can get us to explaining the majority of support for war. So in my book, the central argument im making is that what we learned in about 65, 70 5 years of study of american Public Opinion can and should be applied to Foreign Policy a well. Not just about domestic politics. Opinion about war is just like opinion about domestic politics. Now, theres room for dramatic events, where im not saying that events dont matter at all. Think about pearl harbor and 9 11. These can change opinion. But contrary to the conventional wisdom, Public Opinion during times of crisis is shaped by some of the same attachments we see in the domestic stage. I want to spend most of my time talking about i brought if some slides. Im happy to talk to you afterward to have a back and forth. But i just want to spend the rest of my time making the argument i make in my book here. And so its a Pretty Simple one, right, that Public Opinion is primarily structured by the ebb and flow of partisan and groupbased political conflict. In my book i talk about world war ii, the role of ethnic attachments there, but im going to focus here on partisan attachments, democrats and republicans. And i argue that citizens understand war not for a costbenefit analysis, so here is where i do differ from john and jason, but through opinion ingredients where the kinds of things that go through peoples heads that are more close to home. Partisanship and attachments to particular political leaders are the driving force of Public Opinion about war. So opinion about war is not willynilly. There was a time in american politics where we talked about sort of a plastic mood of Public Opinion shifting to and free throw fro. Were not saying that. There is a structure but its a simple one that follows partisan conflict. I call this my elite cue theory. So citizens take cues from partisan elites, from political leaders. Id say that information matt matters, right so, people need to know where leaders stand in order to take cues from them, right so, that if you want to know lets say youre a republican, you want to take cues from Party Leadership, you need to have some attention to politics. You need to be paying some ateng to know who stands where on which issue. Im going to get to that in a minute. And that these cues i think can be negative or positive. So something john and jason brought up is basically how can we explain democratic opposition to the iraq war when democratic politicians rr largely silent . In the book i argue that polarization, right, this difference between the parties, can occur even in the absence of vocal opposition. If cue givers take strong and distinct positions. So think about it in the case of the iraq war, george bush. So i live now in cambridge, massachusetts. I grew up on the Upper West Side of manhattan. I can tell you from experience talking to my friends george bush was a very strong cue giver in those cases. If people if george bush liked something according to many of the people i grew up with, it had to be wrong. So you dont need to have democrats saying this is a bad war. You just have to have people especially in the wake of think about george bush in the 2000 election that its something that basically for majority of democrats, anything that george bush was for they were against. One of my favorite things, theres a great book by Gary Jacobson looking at hoe larization in american politics. And theres a question that says is george bush a uniter or divider . That was asked right after the 2000 election. Its often quoted because 50 said he was a uniter, 50 says a divider. If you look among democrats, about 80 said he was a divider, among republicans, 80 said he was a uniter. So where you stand fends on where you sit. I think thats a driving force here. We can see this in Public Opinion. So john told you about the split in partisan Public Opinion. And this is through the end of 2008, which is when i stopped writing the book, and i havent updated it since then. But its more of the same. Theres no happy ending where everyone comes together. You can see throughout the iraq war you had huge partisan gaps, you know, that support ebbs and flows, but that partisan gap remains strong. So this is kind of one thing. Heres a very simple way to show the impact of partisanship. I just want to show it a little more subtly. Remember i said that information matters, right, how much attention people pay to politics matters. So what i do in my book and what others have done before me, most notably john zeller, is to look at what happens if we compare republicans who pay a lot of attention to politics to democrat who is pay a lot of attention to politics. These are the people who should be most divided. If you dont Pay Attention to politics, youre not really sure, even though you call yourself a democrat, maybe you dont know where the democrats stand, if youre republican, you dont know where the republicans stand, we should see smaller gaps. So john zeller really did the seminal piece of Public Opinion work in the last 25 years. This is a very hightech graph. You can see here. Kind of draw you to this bottom here. This is the first iraq war. This is the percent who say congress should approve military action against iraq. This is right before the war starts. You can see among the people at the lowest level of Political Awareness on the far left, these are people who dont pay any attention to politics, no differences between republicans and democrats. But if we look at the highly informed, the people who pay the most attention, we see large splits, right. So i want you to kind of take this visual frame here, divergence versus here, this middle graph, which is right before in october when democrats you might i remember, probably not everyone in this room remembers before the 1990 election