Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions

Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro Souza (), Oliver Vanden Eynde and Austin Wright ()
Additional contact information
Pedro Souza: QMUL - Queen Mary University of London
Austin Wright: University of Chicago

PSE Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. In this paper, we study the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the otherwise exogenous timing of survey collection across 26,776 respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase coverage of the Afghan conflict and public demand for withdrawal, with heterogeneous effects consistent with an original theoretical argument. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the crucial role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

Keywords: International security; Public opinion; Political economy; Afghanistan; NATO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04343919v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04343919v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2024)
Working Paper: Losing on the home front? Battlefield casualties, media, and public support for foreign interventions (2024)
Working Paper: Losing on the home front? Battlefield casualties, media, and public support for foreign interventions (2024)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-04343919

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().