Testing the “Proximate Casualties Hypothesis”: Local Troop Loss, Attention to News, and Support for Military Intervention

Abstract

In academic and policy circles, it is believed that the American public is casualties-averse when sending its troops into war and that as casualties mount the public will increasingly call for withdrawal of troops from foreign military interventions. This study tests a variant of this “casualties hypothesis” by examining whether the public conceptualizes the human costs of war in local as well as national terms. Using a massive quantity of public opinion data combined with information on deaths to U.S. soldiers in the Iraq war theater between 2003 and 2006, we show that recent deaths to soldiers from a person's home state prompt an increase in the likelihood of the person supporting withdrawal of troops, independent of cumulative national casualties and recent casualties to soldiers from elsewhere in the country. These results are explained in terms of journalism norms that make recent, local casualties salient to consumers of news, who then use this salient information when their opinions about the progress of a war are probed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.