Case Study: Public Opinion, The War In Iraq
Public Opinion, the War in Iraq, and Presidential
Accountability
Erik Voeten
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
The George Washington University voeten@gwu.edu Paul R. Brewer
Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee prbrewer@uwm.edu Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the 2004 PolMeth Conference at
Stanford University, the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago September 2 2004, and seminars at the University of Maryland and Dartmouth
College. We thank the participants in those seminars and Lee Sigelman for many useful suggestions. We also thank Harlan Geer and Ryan Schoen for valuable research …show more content…
Similar issues arise in holding leaders accountable for their competency in security issues. Leaders, and certainly American presidents, have considerable discretionary powers to wage and manage wars. All else being equal, citizens prefer a leader with proven abilities to make good decisions in times of crisis and to manage wars well. The competency of a leader is, however, not directly observable and can only be inferred from outcomes. In the long run, mounting casualties and battlefield defeats ought to undermine beliefs among the public that an incumbent is a competent war leader. In the short run, however, it is not at all clear how citizens will draw inferences from individual outcomes that are only opaquely related to a leader’s competence.
Hence, the accountability process is likely to be indirect: citizens form impressions about the war and then use those in their evaluations of the incumbent. This calls into question a traditional mode of analysis that examines the direct impact of events and casualties on presidential evaluations (e.g., Mueller 1973, Gelpi et al. 1994). Instead, we expect that after controlling for subjective appraisals of the war, casualties
Accountability
Erik Voeten
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
The George Washington University voeten@gwu.edu Paul R. Brewer
Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee prbrewer@uwm.edu Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the 2004 PolMeth Conference at
Stanford University, the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago September 2 2004, and seminars at the University of Maryland and Dartmouth
College. We thank the participants in those seminars and Lee Sigelman for many useful suggestions. We also thank Harlan Geer and Ryan Schoen for valuable research …show more content…
Similar issues arise in holding leaders accountable for their competency in security issues. Leaders, and certainly American presidents, have considerable discretionary powers to wage and manage wars. All else being equal, citizens prefer a leader with proven abilities to make good decisions in times of crisis and to manage wars well. The competency of a leader is, however, not directly observable and can only be inferred from outcomes. In the long run, mounting casualties and battlefield defeats ought to undermine beliefs among the public that an incumbent is a competent war leader. In the short run, however, it is not at all clear how citizens will draw inferences from individual outcomes that are only opaquely related to a leader’s competence.
Hence, the accountability process is likely to be indirect: citizens form impressions about the war and then use those in their evaluations of the incumbent. This calls into question a traditional mode of analysis that examines the direct impact of events and casualties on presidential evaluations (e.g., Mueller 1973, Gelpi et al. 1994). Instead, we expect that after controlling for subjective appraisals of the war, casualties