Reframing the Casualties Hypothesis: (Mis)Perceptions of Troop Loss and Public Opinion about War

The casualties hypothesis predicts that as the casualties suffered by a nation mount during a military intervention, public opinion will turn against the intervention and its people will demand troop withdrawal. We use the U.S. war in Iraq as a context for testing the perceived casualties hypothesis, which predicts that public beliefs about the actual number of casualties account for public opinion about a military intervention independent of the number of casualties actually suffered. Using data from several thousand respondents to telephone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2005 and 2006 as well as data on the number of U.S. casualties suffered as of the interview date, we find that relative to correct estimators and underestimators, respondents who believed the U.S. had suffered more casualties than had really occurred were most supportive of withdrawing troops from the conflict. Attention to the news predicted accuracy in one’s beliefs about the number of casualties, but not opinion about the intervention (when accounting for perceptions of the number of casualties suffered), suggesting that accuracy of one’s knowledge mediates the effect of attention to the news on public opinion. Ancillary analyses answer the question as to who is paying attention to the news about the war and who is more likely to have accurate knowledge of casualties. This article was first submitted to IJPOR January 8, 2009. The final version was received September 9, 2009. Corresponding author: Teresa A. Meyers; e-mail: myers.867@buckleyemail.osu.edu In 1922, Walter Lippmann proposed the following hypothetical in his book, Public Opinion: There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days . . . It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September . . .They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies. (p. 1). In this foundational work on public opinion, Lippmann articulates the idea that people’s opinions and actions are driven by their understanding of what is happening, not by the actuality of events. As he states, ‘‘we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact’’ (p. 4, emphasis added). In other words, our attitudes and behavior are influenced as much, more so, or perhaps even exclusively by what we believe to be so rather than what is actually so. In this study, we apply Lippmann’s important insight to testing the casualties hypothesis—that the public’s willingness to remain engaged in a military intervention declines as casualties mount—but we do so focusing not on objective counts of casualties accrued, as have others before us, but instead on the public’s beliefs, right or wrong, about how many casualties have occurred at a given point in time (by ‘‘casualties’’, we mean deaths to soldiers engaged in the military intervention). In the context of the U.S. war in Iraq, we show that there is important individual-level variance in peoples’ beliefs about how many casualties the U.S. has suffered. Additionally, these beliefs about how many casualties have occurred are related to a person’s willingness to remain engaged in the conflict even after accounting for how many casualties have actually occurred. These findings provide further support to claims (at least in the U.S.) that the public is casualties averse, while at the same emphasizing that what people believe about reality plays a role in shaping public opinion independent of the objective reality. EXISTING RESEARCH TESTING THE CASUALTIES HYPOTHESIS Troop fatalities have been shown to be related to a variety of outcomes. Wartime casualties reduce the legitimacy and political capital of state leaders across the world (Stam, 1966; Jackman, 1993; Eichenberg, Stoll, & Lebo, 2006). This lack of legitimacy can then lead to an inability for those leaders ( M I S ) P E R C E P T I O N S , C A S U A L T I E S , A N D O P I N I O N 257