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| 1 |
ID:
178205
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| Summary/Abstract |
What are the consequences of women dying in combat? We study how women fighting on the frontlines of the military affects public attitudes toward (1) military conflict and (2) women’s equality. We demonstrate through a series of survey experiments that women dying in combat does not reduce public support for war. However, women’s combat deaths do shape perceptions of women’s equality. Women dying in combat increases support for gender equality, particularly in the public sphere of work and politics, but only among women respondents. The findings indicate that women’s combat deaths do not undermine leaders’ ability to garner support for war, but combat service—and indeed, combat sacrifice—alone is insufficient to yield women’s “first-class citizenship” among the general US public. The results highlight how major policy changes challenging traditional conceptions of gender and war can generate positive attitudinal shifts concentrated among members of the underrepresented community.
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| 2 |
ID:
160577
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do leaders’ statements about conflict duration affect public support for their handling of war? We build on two disparate strands of prior research to theorize how approval depends on perceptions of both war's expected value and of the leader themself. The information available for making these evaluations changes over time. The public relies on elite cues in early stages of war. Cues predicting a short conflict mobilize support. As conflict unfolds, the actual conditions provide information about the accuracy of earlier statements, while subsequent messages provide information about the consistency of these statements. Both allow the public to learn about the leader. Inaccuracy and inconsistency negatively affect evaluations of the leader and reduce support for war. Using a panel survey experiment to test these predictions, we find that public approval is highest when (1) the leader initially predicts a short conflict and (2) when initial predictions prove accurate. The results reveal an intertemporal tradeoff for leaders. Predicting a short conflict is optimal for mobilizing support but potentially suboptimal for retaining that support.
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| 3 |
ID:
179868
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| Summary/Abstract |
How does the design of military institutions affect who bears the costs of war? We answer this question by studying the transformative shift from segregated to integrated US military units during the Korean War. Combining new micro-level data on combat fatalities with archival data on the deployment and racial composition of military battalions, we show that Black and white soldiers died at similar rates under segregation. Qualitative and quantitative evidence provides one potential explanation for this counterintuitive null finding: acute battlefield concerns necessitated deploying military units wherever soldiers were needed, regardless of their race. We next argue that the mid-war racial integration of units, which tied the fates of soldiers more closely together, should not alter the relative fatality rates. The evidence is consistent with this expectation. Finally, while aggregate fatality rates were equal across races, segregation enabled short-term casualty discrepancies. Under segregation there were high casualty periods for white units followed by high casualty periods for Black units. Integration eliminated this variability. This research note highlights how enshrining segregationist policies within militaries creates permissive conditions for either commanders' choices, or the dictates and variability of conflict, to shape who bears war's costs.
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