The Two Front Homefront: American Attitudes Toward Afghanistan in the Shadow of Iraq. Christopher Gelpi. Duke University

Transcription

1 The Two Front Homefront: American Attitudes Toward Afghanistan in the Shadow of Iraq Christopher Gelpi Duke University DRAFT: Please do not cite without the author s permission. Comments are welcome and can be directed to gelpi@duke.edu This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

2 It has long been American military doctrine that our armed forces should have the capacity to fight more than one war at a time. While American soldiers have stationed in numerous countries simultaneously over the past half century, the US military has rarely been asked to engage in sustained combat operations in two separate theaters since the end of World War II. Consequently, the American public has also rarely been asked to support two simultaneous major combat operations and the human casualties that such operations inevitably entail. The renewal of America s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008 after its defeat in 2002 has shed important light on the operational difficulties involved in carrying out two major combat operations (Shanker, 2009). At the same time, this conflict also provides analysts with an opportunity to learn about how the American public responds to the demands of two wars. Policy makers clearly fear that public attitudes toward one military operation may spillover and influence attitudes toward another. President Clinton, for example, feared intervention in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 because he believed that lingering public disaffection from the failed operation in Somalia the previous year would sour the public on the Rwandan mission (Kuperman 2001; Brunk 2008). Scholarly observers, however, have relatively little to say about the potential for spillover effects in terms of public support for fighting two wars simultaneously. On the one hand, a growing literature suggests that public support for military conflicts responds in reasonable ways to new information about the likely costs and benefits of each particular mission (Mueller 1971, 1973; Gartner and Segura 1998; Larson 2000; Feaver and Gelpi 2004; Eichenberg 2005; Gartner 2008; Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler 2009; Gelpi 2010).

3 While on the other hand, a substantial literature in political psychology suggests that such situations are ripe for motivated processing as attitudes toward one conflict shape the formation of attitudes toward the other (Lord, Ross and Lepper 1979; Taber and Lodge 1986). In particular, the political psychology literature suggests that individuals tend to rely on accessible attitudes that are well developed and easily recalled when forming new opinions (Fazio et. al. 1989; Fazio 1989; Petty et. al. 1997). Consequently, spillover effects should be most likely to occur when attitudes toward one of the two military conflicts are more developed and accessible than the other. After examining the relative accessibility of public attitudes toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I investigate the extent to which public support for the Iraq War spills over to shape public perceptions of Afghanistan. Relying on a survey of 2,000 respondents fielded in the fall of 2008, I find that public perceptions of Afghanistan were profoundly influenced by attitudes toward Iraq. My analysis of an experimental manipulation of newspaper stories indicates that aggregate support for Afghanistan responds to new information in ways that are consistent with rational expectations theory. But my analysis at the individual level indicates that attitudes toward Iraq act as a filter that biases their processing of new information regarding Afghanistan. Thus what appears to be rational updating at the aggregate level actually reflects changes in polarization of opinion that are driven by motivated processing. These results suggest some limitations to the applicability of the rational expectations theory of war support. In particular, these results highlight the fact

4 that this approach assumes that individuals have well developed and accessible attitudes about a war that they can update. When military operations are not salient in the public mind, individuals may use biased shortcuts to form opinions regarding conflicts that they know little or nothing about. In addition, these results suggest that the current debate over public support for the Afghan War is, in large part, also a debate over Iraq. Thus in order for President Obama to persuade the public that his strategy in Afghanistan is succeeding, he may also need to persuade opponents of the Iraq War one of his core constituencies to change their views of Iraq as well. Understanding Public Support for War Early research on the American public s attitudes toward the use of military force tended to view public opinion toward foreign policy as generally idiosyncratic and unstructured (Almond 1950; Lippman 1955; Campbell et. al. 1960; Converse 1964). But Mueller s (1971, 1973) pivotal work on casualties and public support for the Vietnam and Korean Wars marked a sea change in the study of public opinion and American foreign policy (see also Milstein 1968, 1973). Mueller s findings implied that the public formed coherent and systematic judgments about foreign policy events. To be sure, Mueller did not contend that public attitudes toward war are highly sophisticated. According to his view, public attitudes are driven by a single piece of information: the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the operation. Nonetheless, the core of Mueller s claim is that the public relies on news events

5 reported from the battlefield casualties to form and update their attitudes toward an ongoing war. Building on Mueller s work, much of the growing literature on casualty tolerance has adopted the view that the public engages in a cost benefit analysis comparing the likely benefits of continuing to fight with the expected costs (Larson 2000; Gartner 2008). Mueller (1971, 1973, 2005) and Gartner and Segura (1998, see also Gartner 2008), for example, focus on incoming information about casualties. Jentleson (1992, Jentleson & Britton 1998; see also Eichenberg 2005) focus on information about the mission objective. Kull and Destler (1999) focus on information about the participation of allied states and international organizations in the conflict. And Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler (2005/2006, 2007, 2009) focus on information about the success of the mission on the battlefield. Gartner (2008) builds upon this perspective to formulate a rational expectations theory of war support. More central to this literature than normative debates about rationality, however, is the common assertion that individuals respond primarily to cues that are rooted in objective characteristics of the military conflict. This research is rooted in a broader literature suggesting that the public appears to respond in systematic ways to new information about foreign policy events (Nincic 1988, 1992; Page and Shapiro, 1992; Peffley and Hurwitz, 1992; Aldrich et. al. 2006). One of the notable characteristics of the rational expectations literature on war support, however, is that it has been founded on evidence from wars that were very salient on the public agenda. Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq War provide the majority of the evidence in the debate over public support for war. Each of these

6 wars was costly in terms of American casualties and so received a great deal of attention from the public. Other conflicts that have been studied intensively in this literature such as Somalia, Lebanon, and the Gulf War resulted in lower numbers of American casualties, but still received tremendous amounts of media attention. Thus it seems likely that attitudes toward these conflicts would also be accessible to members of the public. We have good reason to expect, however, that a second war being carried on in the midst of a highly salient war may receive significantly lower attention from the press, and so the public s attitudes toward such a conflict may be less coherent and accessible. Media coverage of Afghanistan, for example, was dwarfed by coverage of Iraq from 2002 through In such instances, the micro foundations in terms of opinion formation upon which rational expectations theory rests may be weak or entirely absent. More specifically, the lower salience of a second conflict may open the door to more extensive motivated processing in the formation of public attitudes. Public opinion studies of motivated processing have argued that individuals discount information that conflicts with their existing beliefs and disproportionally attend to cues that reinforce their current attitudes (Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Taber and Lodge 2006). Rather than updating their attitudes in response to new information, these arguments suggest that individuals will ignore facts and events that are inconsistent with their predispositions. Works in psychology such as Lord, Ross and Lepper (1979), as well as extensions of this perspective into political science (Taber and Lodge 2006) acknowledge that

7 individuals may attend to media reporting on real world events, but contends that they will selectively ignore cues about events that conflict with their pre existing beliefs. Thus respondents who support a military conflict will attend to reports that it is going well, while those who oppose the operation will attend to media reports suggesting that things are going poorly. Much of the literature on motivated processing in political science has focused on party identification as the source of bias (Abramowitz 1978; Bartels 2002; Lenz 2006; Achen and Bartels 2006; Berinsky 2007; Berinsky and Druckman 2007). In this study, however, I am investigating whether the existence of another parallel issue within the public debate such as two overlapping wars can create biased processing. Literature in psychology on attitude formation suggests that individuals extrapolate from accessible attitudes when faced with an unfamiliar attitude objects (Fazio et. al. 1989; Fazio 1989; Petty et. al. 1997). Thus if faced with questions regarding a war about which they have little or no information, individuals may extrapolate from attitudes that they have about more familiar wars. That is, when faced with determining whether they support a second (unfamiliar) war, individuals may reason by analogy based on the other ongoing war about which they have more information. Turning to our current example of this phenomenon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the rational expectations approach to understanding war support would expect that reporting on good news events about progress in Afghanistan would lead individuals to be more supportive of the war while coverage of bad news events will reduce support (Gartner 2008; Gelpi 2010). This pattern of

8 updating on Afghanistan should persist regardless of an individual s attitudes about Iraq. The motivated processing approach, on the other hand, would suggest that attitudes about Iraq will have an important influence on perceptions of Afghanistan to the extent that individuals have more information and more accessible attitudes about Iraq. Specifically, this approach expects that attitudes toward Iraq will serve as filters of new information about Afghanistan. Individuals who are supportive of the Iraq War should be selectively attentive to positive information about Afghanistan, while opponents of the Iraq War should be selectively attentive to bad news about Afghanistan. DATA ON PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN Data on public attitudes toward foreign policy were gathered by Polimetrix/YouGov in a survey of 2,000 respondents fielded from September 27 through October 11, Polimetrix gathers data from a volunteer opt in panel of respondents via the internet and produces samples that are representative of the national public through a statistical procedure that selects opt in respondents that are most similar to a random draw from the 2004 American Communities Study (ACS) conducted by the Census Bureau (Rivers 2007). As a relatively new method of selecting respondents, Polimetrix s matched opt in panel methodology has attracted attention. Malhotra and Krosnick (2007) argue that levels of partisanship, political interest, and even the structure of relationships within the data differ between a matched opt in panel and the random sample generated for the American National Election Study (ANES). Hill et. al. (2007), on the other hand, conclude that the

9 sample matching techniques produces modest biases which are analogous to the kinds of biases involved in random digit dialing (RDD) telephone surveys. In order to evaluate the comparability of the Polimetrix data to probability samples, I compare these data to two different probability samples from prominent scientific studies: the American National Election Study (ANES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). Since the most critical issues of sample bias focused on levels of political interest and activity, I begin by comparing voter registration rates between the Polimetrix and ANES samples in These two samples appear to be very similar in terms taking action to become involved in politics. Approximately 89% of the matched opt in sample stated that they were registered to vote in October of 2008, while in the fall of % of ANES respondents stated that they were registered to vote. 1 Next, since this study focuses on attitudes toward foreign policy, I compared the level of interest in foreign affairs across the Polimetrix and GSS samples in This comparison is somewhat less exact, since the two surveys ask this question in somewhat different ways. Nonetheless, 25% of GSS respondents stated that they were very interested in international issues, while 22% of the Polimetrix sample stated that they follow foreign affairs all the time. Thus the matched opt in sample appears to align very closely with traditional probabilitybased sampling methods in terms of its level of political activity and interest in foreign affairs. 1 It is possible, of course, that differences in survey mode are also affecting these results. For example, ANES respondents might have been more likely to state that they were registered to vote because they were embarrassed to admit otherwise in a face-to-face survey. Nonetheless, these results suggest that the net impact of the differences in sample selection and survey mode between the matched opt-in sample and ANES on levels of political interest are quite modest in this case.

10 THE ACCESSIBILITY OF ATTITUDES TOWARD IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN We begin our empirical investigation with an examination of the cognitive accessibility of public attitudes toward Iraq and Afghanistan. One important measure of accessibility is the extent to which individuals retain information about an issue and are able to recall it when asked. Political psychology models of voting, for example, emphasize issue salience because it will be necessary for individuals to call up information about an issue into active memory if they are to use that information to make judgments or decisions (Aldrich, Sullivan and Borgida 1989; Aldrich et. al. 2006). Thus as the first measure of the accessibility of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I asked respondents to estimate the number of American soldiers that they thought had been killed in each of these wars. Asking respondents to estimate KIA should an effective measure of salience and accessibility because it asks respondents for factual knowledge as opposed to opinions. The ability to estimate US KIA accurately demonstrates that the respondent keeps information about that war easily accessible without conflating that accessibility with any substantive judgments about the issue. Respondents estimates of the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are displayed in Figure 1. The actual number of US soldiers killed in Iraq by the end of September 2008 was 4,175, while the actual number of US soldiers killed in Afghanistan by that date was 610. I created intervals around these numbers and coded any response within 20% of the correct number as

11 correct. Responses that were more than 20% too high or too low were identified as incorrect. Figure 1 About Here Consistent with previous studies of this question, the result in Figure 1 suggest that in the aggregate the American public has fairly accessible knowledge of how many soldiers have died in Iraq (Bennett and Flickinger, 2008). Both the median and the modal response to this question were 4,000, which is a very good estimate especially in light of the reduced media attention paid to the American body count during According to the Tyndall Report, for example, Iraq was the most reported story on the three major TV network evening news broadcasts in A total of 1,888 minutes of airtime were devoted to Iraq on the big three evening news programs, nearly double the next more reported story the primary elections at 1,072 minutes. In 2008, on the other hand, election coverage filled 3,677 minutes of airtime and the economic downturn absorbed another 2,767 minutes. Iraq ranked a distant third in coverage at 434 minutes on the major network evening news shows. Nonetheless, approximately 56% of the public could still estimate the number of US battle deaths within 20% of the correct number. To be sure, a significant minority did appear to underestimate the human costs of Iraq. About 25% of the public underestimated US KIA by more than 20%. Within this group, the median estimate was 2,000 but the modal estimate was a more respectable 3,000. This group was balanced by a slightly smaller segment of the public about 15% 2 The Tyndall Report is available at

12 who overestimated the human toll in Iraq by more than 20%. The modal estimate in this last group was 10,000. Any assessment of the public s factual knowledge about international issues is likely to be of the half full vs. half empty variety. But despite the mistakes by some respondents, the data in Figure 1 suggest that in the aggregate the public is quite well informed about the human costs of the Iraq War. Certainly to the extent that the median voter matters politically we can say that he or she is very well informed about the human toll in Iraq. Thus despite the rise of the economy as an important issue and a decline in coverage of the violence in Iraq and the human toll for American soldiers, this war remained salient and accessible in the public mind in the fall of Afghanistan, on the other hand, does not seem to have attained nearly the same kind of salience or accessibility. Individuals do not seem to retain or recall significant information about the war. This lack of salience is not very surprising given the relative paucity of media coverage. In 2007, for example, the Tyndall Report finds that Afghanistan was not among the top 20 most reported stories of the year on the major TV network evening news broadcasts. Afghanistan actually became more salient in 2008 with 126 minutes of network coverage, but even this level of attention left Afghanistan with less than 30% of the airtime of Iraq, even with the sharp decline in Iraq coverage that year. Thus in contrast to the patterns we saw regarding Iraq, the public seems to misunderstand the costs of Afghanistan in a significant way. More specifically, almost 70% of the respondents overestimated battle deaths in Afghanistan by more than 20%. Both the median and the

13 modal responses to this question were 1,000 KIA an overestimate of almost 40%. Only about 15% of the respondents gave estimates of US KIA in Afghanistan that were within 20% of the correct number. This inability to recall accurately the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan is not a function of the relatively small number of soldiers killed. For example Steven Kull conducted a similar study of public knowledge of casualties in Iraq in At the time of his study approximately 740 American soldiers had been killed in Iraq. And yet, Kull (2004) found that approximately 58% of respondents placed the toll at between 500 and 1,000 (i.e. within about 30% of the correct number). By this same standard approximately two thirds of the public could give a correct estimate of the death toll in Iraq in 2008, but only about 18% of the public gave a correct estimate in Afghanistan. As another measure of the salience of Iraq and Afghanistan to voters in 2008, I asked respondents to rank the most important issues facing the federal government after the election. Respondents were provided with a list of seven possible issues and were asked to place them in rank order. The seven issues were: the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the economy, health care, immigration, the environment, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These issues appeared on a web page in a randomized order and then respondents were asked to drag and drop each issue so as to rank them in their preferred order. Figure 2 displays the distribution of rankings given to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Figure 2 About Here

14 First, it is worth noting that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was most frequently cited as the top issue in Nearly 50% of respondents ranked the economy as the most important issue, and another 20% placed it second. As it turns out, the war in Iraq did not even receive the second highest number of placements as the most important issue. That distinction went to health care, with 15% of respondents placing that issue first, as compared to the 10% who placed the Iraq War at the top of the list. Nonetheless, Figure 2 does demonstrate that the public did continue to rate Iraq as an important issue. Nearly 50% of respondents placed the Iraq War among the top three issues facing the country, the modal response ranked Iraq third, and nearly 70% placed it among the top four issues. Afghanistan, by contrast, continued to lag significantly behind Iraq in terms of public priorities. Less than a quarter of the public placed Afghanistan among the top three issues facing the country, and a majority of the respondents ranked it as fifth or lower on the list of seven issues. The modal ranking of Afghanistan was fifth, and approximately 80% of respondents in the survey ranked Iraq higher than Afghanistan on the national agenda. This ranking would seem to be consistent with the findings regarding the public s low level of information about casualties in Afghanistan. Whether it was due to a lack of media coverage or the pressing nature of other issues, Afghanistan was not cognitively salient to voters in ATTITUDES TOWARD AFGHANISTAN IN THE SHADOW OF IRAQ

15 These data clearly indicate that public attitudes toward Iraq were generally more accessible than those toward Afghanistan. Yet as the Afghan War increased in prominence during 2008 and 2009 we saw numerous polls measuring the public s willingness to escalate America s military presence in that country. With so little information on the conflict, how did the public begin to form opinions on Afghanistan? What role did Iraq play in the formation of these attitudes and how did those predispositions shape their attitude formation as they continued to gather new information? I address this question through the experimental manipulation of news reporting on the Afghan War. Subjects were presented with a randomly assigned newspaper story about the Afghan War with one of three treatment conditions: 1) a positive story about American progress in Afghanistan, 2) a negative news story about problems in Afghanistan, and 3) a control group who received no news story. The positive and negative news events stories were similar in both format and length. Each story focused on a raid by US military forces on Taliban militants and each story identified the raid as part of a broader crackdown on insurgents that coincides with an increase in US force levels. The positive story then mentions a reduction in the overall level of violence against US forces and Afghan civilians and mentions a reduction in the opium trade as evidence of progress toward increased effectiveness by the Afghan government. The negative story, on the other hand, mentions civilian casualties as a result of the raid and continued bombings and violence in Afghanistan. The negative story then notes the escalation of the opium trade as evidence of the Afghan government s eroding effectiveness. All events in

16 both the positive and negative news stories were reported in mainstream US newspapers between September 2007 and February The text was kept as close as possible to the original wording so as to give it the feel of a real newspaper story. The text of the experimental treatments is included in Appendix A. 3 After their exposure to these fictionalized news stories, subjects were asked a series of questions about their support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I measure attitudes toward the Afghan war with two dependent variables. First, I focus on respondents evaluation of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan by asking, would you say that the situation in Afghanistan is getting better, getting worse, or are things staying about the same? This question taps fairly directly and narrowly in to the events reported in the news story and should allow me to evaluate how individuals are using the information in the news story to update their opinions. Second, in order to examine whether the new information in the news story has an impact on respondents broader support for the Afghan War, I asked: 1) whether President Bush did the right thing by using military force against Afghanistan in 2001; 2) how likely would you say the U.S. is to succeed or not succeed in Afghanistan; 3) how strongly would you favor or oppose sending additional US troops to Afghanistan; and 4) do you think the US should keep military troops in Afghanistan until the situation is stabilized, or should the US remove its troops as soon as possible? Responses to these questions scaled 3 The newspaper stories also included other treatment manipulations but I focus here on the response to new information from news events about Afghanistan as a way to capture motivated processing. The other randomly assigned treatment categories were included as controls in the statistical analysis.

17 reasonably well, yielding an index of Afghan support with a Cronbach s alpha score of The key variable conditioning the relationship between news information and Afghan support is support for the Iraq War. I calculate support for the Iraq War through respondents answers to a similar battery of 5 questions. Specifically, respondents were asked: 1) whether they approved of President Bush s initial decision to attack Iraq, 2) whether they believed that the so called surge of US troops into Iraq in 2007 had mad things better in Iraq, 3) whether they believed the US war effort in Iraq was likely to succeed, 4) whether they approved of a timetable for withdrawing US troops, and 5) whether they approved of allowing the withdrawal of US forces to be determined by conditions in Iraq. Responses to these questions scaled together quite strongly, yielding an alpha score of Since attitudes toward Iraq and increasingly toward Afghanistan have become strongly associated with partisan identification, I control for party ID with a seven point scale ranging from strong Republican to strong Democrat. In addition, since the spillover effect of attitudes toward Iraq is likely to be a function of the level of information that respondents have about international affairs, I control for respondents level of interest in politics. The results remain unchanged if either or both of these control variables are dropped. Figure 3 displays the average treatment effects for the positive and negative news stories relative to the control group that received no news story. This analysis captures the average effect of the treatments without regard to respondent s views on the Iraq War. The dependent variable is a three category ordinal variable

18 capturing respondents perceptions of the current situation in Afghanistan. Respondents can state that they believe that the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse, staying about the same, or getting better. The blue columns reflect the treatment effects for the positive news story, while the red columns reflect the treatment effects for the negative news story. The narrow black bars represent the 95% confidence intervals around the estimated treatment effects. Thus if a black bar does not cross the zero axis, then that estimated effect is statistically significant at the.05 level. Figure 3 About Here The average treatment effects for the positive and negative news stories are solidly consistent with rational expectations theory. Subjects who received the good news story were about 14% less likely to state that they believe the situation is getting worse. Conversely, these subjects were 7% more likely to state that the situation was staying the same, and 8% more likely to state that it was improving relative to those who received no treatment. Those who received the bad news story, on the other hand, were 7% more likely to state that the situation was getting worse in Afghanistan. These subjects they were also 3% more likely to state that the situation was staying the same and 4% more likely to state that the situation was getting worse. The overall effects of negative information may be somewhat smaller because the public was already quite skeptical about the situation in Afghanistan. About half of the respondents who received no treatment thought that the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. Nonetheless, on average the public appears to be responding to new information by updating their beliefs in a reasoned manner.

19 Once we account for individuals attitudes toward the Iraq War, however, our understanding of the formation of attitudes toward Afghanistan begins to change. Figure 4 displays the impact of respondents support for the Iraq War on their evaluation of Afghanistan depending on the news treatment that they received. The blue columns on the left hand side reflect the impact of Iraq among those who received a positive news story, the red columns on the right hand side reflect the impact of Iraq among those who received a negative news story, and the purple columns in the center capture the impact of Iraq among those who did not receive any news story. The effects in Figure 4 capture the impact of moving from the 10 th percentile to the 90 th percentile of support for the Iraq War. Clearly, attitudes toward Iraq have a substantial impact on the evaluation of Afghanistan, regardless of what kind of news story treatment one received. Reading a news story about Afghanistan did seem to prime subjects somewhat to rely on their attitudes toward Iraq in evaluating Afghanistan, but only the reading of a positive news story created a statistically significant increase in the impact of Iraq, and in either case the impact was relatively modest. For those who read a positive news story, for example, moving from the 10 th percentile to the 90 th percentile of support for the Iraq War decreased the probability that they would state that the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse by nearly 47%. The same increase in support for Iraq increased the probability that respondents would state that Afghanistan is staying the same or getting better by 20% and 26% respectively. Even if the subject received no news treatment, changing Iraq support from the 10 th percentile to the 90 th, decreased the probability that they would view Afghanistan as getting worse by 36% and

20 increased the probability that they would view it as stable or getting better by 26% and 13% respectively. Figure 4 About Here These effects are substantively quite large, and are even somewhat larger than the estimated impact of party identification. Given the very low levels of information that individuals have about the war in Afghanistan, respondents did seem to extrapolate from their beliefs about the Iraq War when asked to evaluate Afghanistan. Such spillover effects are substantively important, but they do not constitute evidence of biased processing, nor do they contradict rational expectations theory. After all, when one has so little information about Afghanistan, extrapolating from Iraq seems a plausible and perhaps even adaptively functional way to make initial judgments. Figure 5, however, examines how attitudes toward Iraq influence individuals responses to the news story treatments. The blue and red columns on the left hand side of the figure reflect the impact of good news and bad news stories on the evaluation of Afghanistan by Iraq supporters. The blue and red columns on the right hand side of the figure reflect the impact of good and bad news stories on the evaluation of Afghanistan among opponents of the Iraq War, and the columns in the center of the figure reflect the responses of those who are at the median level of support. Iraq supporters responded strongly to the positive news events about Afghanistan, increasing the probability that they would view Afghanistan as getting better by nearly 15%. Conversely, a good news story caused Iraq supporters to reduce the probability that they would state that Afghanistan is getting worse by

21 more than 15%. But while Iraq supporters update their views of Afghanistan in response to positive news stories, they appear to ignore bad news. All of the estimated effects for negative stories among Iraq supporters are substantively negligible and do not approach statistical significance. Figure 5 About Here Iraq opponents, on the other hand, respond in just the opposite manner. Negative news stories raise the probability that Iraq opponents will view Afghanistan as getting worse by 8%. The probability that they will view Afghanistan as staying the same drops by 6% and the probability that they will view the situation as getting better drops by 2%. All of these effects are statistically significant. Substantively they are somewhat smaller than the impact of positive events for Iraq supporters because Iraq opponents are already so negative about the situation in Afghanistan. When it comes to positive news stories, however, Iraq opponents do not appear to update their views of Afghanistan. As with the response of supporters to negative news, none of the effects of positive news stories are significant for Iraq opponents. Only those who are relatively neutral on the issue of the Iraq War appear to update their attitudes in both directions in response to news events as would be expected by rational expectations theory. In this case, the estimated effects of good news and bad news stories are roughly equivalent to the average treatment effects discussed above. For example, a positive news story about Afghanistan causes respondents who are neutral on Iraq to decrease the probability that they will evaluate Afghanistan as getting worse by 13%. Conversely, a negative news story

22 will increase the probability that a subject who is neutral on Iraq will evaluate Afghanistan as getting worse by 7%. Thus in the aggregate the public updates its views of Afghanistan in response to new information as predicted by rational expectations theory. But the very low accessibility of attitudes toward Afghanistan appears to open the door for motivated processing within subgroups of the population. In contrast to Iraq where respondents appear to update in response to surprising information (Gelpi 2010) the public appears to use Iraq as a lens for filtering news about Afghanistan. Those who have already made up their minds about Iraq appear to extrapolate these views to Afghanistan and are reluctant to attend to new information on the conflict. But analyzing respondents evaluations of Afghanistan after reading news stories about Afghanistan is a relatively narrow examination of the formation of attitudes toward that war. After all, the content of the evaluation question is linked quite closely to the content of the news story. This is entirely appropriate for measuring the extent to which subjects update their views based on new information. Thus it is an appropriate testing ground for comparing rational expectations to motivated processing approaches. But this analysis tells us somewhat less about how new information may or may not alter an individual s overall support for the Afghan War. Such judgments require individuals to combine any new information that they gather about Afghanistan with a variety of other attitudes about the justification, likely success, and costliness of the conflict. Thus in order to investigate the impact of news events on overall support for the Afghan

23 War, I examine the impact of the news treatments on respondents overall support for Afghanistan as measured in the five item index discussed above. Figure 6 displays both the average treatment effects for the positive and negative news stories on support for Afghanistan, and the conditional treatment effects for Iraq supporters, moderates, and opponents. Not surprisingly, the effects of the news stories are somewhat more muted regarding overall support for Afghanistan. But the pattern of effects remains remarkably consistent, and all of the expected effects remain statistically significant. Specifically, in the aggregate analysis that pools all respondents, exposure to a positive news story increases support for Afghanistan by This effect is statistically significant at the.05 level. The median level of support for Afghanistan is 0.09, with a standard deviation of.69. Thus exposure to a positive news story moves support for the Afghan War from the median to approximately the 52 nd percentile. Exposure to a bad news story, on the other hand, lowered overall support from the median to the 46 th percentile on average. These are modest effects, to be sure, but it is actually striking that exposure to a single fictionalized news story of about 250 words could significantly alter overall support for the war. After all, overall support includes considerations like whether the war was justified, whether the US will prevail, whether the US should escalate its troop levels and so on. The effect of a single news story like this one is almost certainly short lived, but the updating of broad attitudes in response to a news story does suggest that the reporting of news events does cause an updating of overall war support over multiple repeated news exposures. Figure 6 About Here

24 As was the case with evaluations of the Afghan situation, Iraq supporters and opponents appear to filter out events that are inconsistent with their views of Iraq when updating their overall support for Afghanistan. Iraq supporters who received a good news story, for example, increased their support for Afghanistan by.09 a shift from the median to nearly the 54 th percentile. But Iraq supporters who received a bad news story did not significantly change their support of the Afghan War. Iraq opponents who read a negative story, on the other hand, lowered their support by 0.11 a drop from the median to the 43 rd percentile but exposure to good news had no effect on their support. Only those who were neutral on the Iraq War shifted their support both up and down in response to news events. The impact of the news treatments among Iraq neutrals was almost identical to the average treatment effects discussed above. Finally, I examine the impact of overall support for Iraq on overall support for Afghanistan. Figure 7 displays the impact of support for Iraq on support for Afghanistan for each of the three treatment categories. The columns in Figure 7 display the impact of a one unit change in support for Iraq, which is approximately equal to shifting support from the median to the 90 th percentile. Once again, exposure to a news story about war in Afghanistan appears to cue subjects to rely on their attitudes toward Iraq when formulating their support for Afghanistan. In this case, however, the effects are not statistically significant. The overall impact of Iraq attitudes on support for Afghanistan is both statistically significant and substantively large. Specifically a one unit increase in support for the Iraq War leads to approximately a 0.6 unit increase in support for Afghanistan. That is,

25 changing Iraq support from the median to the 90 th percentile increases support for Afghanistan from the median to just past the 80 th percentile. Taken together with the previous evidence on the cognitive accessibility of information about Iraq and the impact that Iraq has on responsiveness to new information about Afghanistan, these results suggest that Iraq casts a long shadow over Afghanistan in the public mind. Figure 7 About Here Discussion The results of this experiment suggest that in the aggregate the public does respond to new information about Afghanistan as expected by the rational expectations theory of war support. Positive news events stories caused readers on average to improve their evaluation of the current situation in Afghanistan and increase their overall level of support for the war. Negative news events stories, on the other hand, had the overall effect of eroding readers evaluations of the situation in Afghanistan and undermining their support for the war. But respondents knowledge of the level of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their rankings of important issues facing the nation suggested that public attitudes toward Iraq were much more accessible and well developed than public attitudes toward Afghanistan. This discrepancy raised the possibility that attitudes toward Iraq might spillover and act as filters in the formation of opinions on Afghanistan. An analysis both of subjects evaluations of the current situation in Afghanistan and their overall level of support for the war suggest that Iraq has had

26 strong spillover effects. First of all, support for Iraq appears to have a strong direct impact in shaping both evaluations of Afghanistan and especially overall support for the war. These spillover effects are very large roughly equivalent to the impact of party identification. This result is substantively powerful and important, but it does not contradict the rational expectations theory of war support. It merely suggests that individuals with little accessible information about Afghanistan tend to extrapolate their views from the more accessible other war in order to formulate an opinion. More troubling for the rational expectations literature, however, is the fact that attitudes toward Iraq appear to act as a filter that biases the processing of new information about the war in Afghanistan. Subjects with relatively neutral opinions about the Iraq War responded exactly as rational expectations theory would predict by increasing support when presented with good news on US progress and decreasing support when presented with evidence of setbacks. Strong supporters of the Iraq War, however, responded sharply to good news stories about Afghanistan but ignored information about negative events, while strong Iraq opponents did just the opposite. These results have a number of important implications both for our understanding of the formation of public attitudes toward war and for policy makers interested in maintaining public support for an American military operation in Afghanistan that is almost certain to last several more years. First, in terms of the formation of war support, these results suggest some important limitations for the rational expectations model. Studies of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have consistently

27 demonstrated that the public responds in reasoned ways to new information on casualties, the objectives of the military mission, and the likelihood of success (Mueller 1973; Larson 2000; Gartner and Segura 1998; Feaver and Gelpi 2004; Eichenberg 2005; Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler 2009; Gartner 2008; Gelpi 2010). But all of those conflicts were highly salient to the American public, and attitudes toward those wars were generally accessible. These results suggest that when public knowledge about a conflict is low and attitudes are not accessible, individuals may begin to rely on shortcuts in forming their opinions that will create biased processing. This result is important for secondary conflicts such as the war in Afghanistan and may also have implications for the formation of public attitudes toward military conflicts in their early stages. For politicians and political observers interested in the future of public support for the Afghan War, these results suggest that politicians are right to be concerned about the spillover effects that one conflict may have on public attitudes toward another. Those who seek to increase public tolerance for continuing the war effort in Afghanistan, for example, must also be concerned about public attitudes toward Iraq. In particular, if the Obama Administration is to persuade skeptics of the Afghan War to offer their support, these results suggest that they must first persuade opponents of the Iraq War one of their key constituencies to rethink their position on that conflict. Without changing public attitudes toward Iraq, the results here suggest that even a substantial change on the ground in Afghanistan may not alter the attitudes of current skeptics. Instead, only

28 those who are predisposed to hear such good news will update their opinions, further polarizing opinion on the Afghan War. Conclusion For nearly a half century it has been American military doctrine to prepare for more than one major combat theater at a time. But the confluence of a rising conflict in Afghanistan with the receding war in Iraq represents one of the first instances in which this doctrine has been tested. The American public is also faced for the first time since World War II with the question of whether they are willing to support two separate and substantial military operations. To what extent can our knowledge of public support for salient wars such as Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq extend to the public s response to a second front in the war on terror in Afghanistan? I have addressed this question through an analysis of survey experiments conducted during the 2008 American presidential election a campaign in which both Iraq and Afghanistan played prominent roles. The results indicate that the greater cognitive accessibility of attitudes toward Iraq relative to Afghanistan led respondents to rely on their attitudes toward Iraq in forming their responses about Afghanistan a conflict about which most respondents knew little. More problematically for the growing rational expectations literature on war support, I also found that respondents use their attitudes toward Iraq as a filter that creates selective attention to new information about Afghanistan. This tendency to rely on accessible attitudes about salient conflicts to form attitudes about less salient ones

29 provides new evidence on the limits of the public s ability to form reasoned attitudes about support for war. Moreover, these results suggest that success on the ground in Afghanistan may not persuade skeptics to support the war unless they are also persuaded to reevaluate their views on Iraq.

30 Figure 1: Public Awareness of US KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan, October 2008 Iraq Afghanistan 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% >20% Too Low Within 20% >20% Too High

31 Figure 2: The Salience of Iraq and Afghanistan as National Issues, October 2008 Iraq Afghanistan 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth Seventh

32 Figure 3: Average Treatment Effects of News Events on Evaluation of Afghanistan Positive Events Negative Events 0.2 Worse Same Better Worse Same Better

33 Figure 4: Impact of Changing Iraq Support from Low to High on Evaluation of Afghanistan by News Event Treatment Positive Events No Events Negative Events 0.6 Worse Same Better Worse Better Worse Worse Same Better

34 Figure 5: Conditional Effects of News Events on Evaluation of Afghanistan Depending on Support for Iraq Iraq Supporters Iraq Neutrals Iraq Opponents Positive Events Negative Events Positive Events Negative Events Positive Events Negative Events Worse Same Better Worse Same Better Worse Same Better Worse Same Better Worse Same Better Worse Same Better

35 Figure 6: Effects of News Events on Afghan Support Depending on Iraq Support Average Effect Iraq Supporters Iraq Neutrals Iraq Opponents 0.25 Positive Events Negative Events Positive Events Negative Events Positive Events Negative Events Positive Events Negative Events

36 Figure 7: Impact of Iraq Support on Afghan Support By News Events Treatment Impact of Iraq Support 0.8 Positive Events No Events Negative Events

37 APPENDIX A: EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENTS POSITIVE EVENTS TREATMENT KABUL (Reuters) A U.S. attack killed about 25 suspected militants linked to Taliban militias on Friday and another 12 al Qaeda fighters were killed in separate raids, the U.S. military said. The raids were part of a crackdown aimed at Sunni Islamist and al Qaeda militias. The U.S. military began the security crackdown in Kabul and then spread into other volatile areas across Afghanistan using a "mini surge" of 4,500 extra U.S. troops in support of thousands of Afghan security forces. The crackdown has been credited for a significant drop in military and civilian casualties in recent months. Rear Adm. Greg Smith, noted the numbers of car bombs have dropped significantly and are causing fewer casualties since the security operation began. The number of weekly attacks in Afghanistan has dropped 60 percent since the 4,500 extra U.S. troops became fully deployed. The 4,500 American forces were deployed to Afghanistan to stanch sectarian violence and to help improve the Karzai government s control over areas plagued by warlords and Taliban militants. Afghanistan s opium trade has begun to decrease, pleasing U.S. commanders who believe that opium plays an important role in funding the Taliban insurgency. Reducing illegal opium trafficking is one of several benchmarks that the U.S. has been pressing the Afghans to meet as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government. "At the beginning of the year we were genuinely concerned by the lack of progress on opium," said one Afghan leader. "Today that has substantially changed. NEGATIVE EVENTS TREATMENT KABUL (Reuters) A U.S. attack killed 19 insurgents and 15 civilians, including nine children, northwest of the capital Thursday one of the heaviest civilian death tolls in an American operation in recent months. The raids were part of a crackdown aimed at Sunni Islamist and al Qaeda militias. The U.S. military began the security crackdown in Kabul and then spread into other volatile areas across Afghanistan using a "mini surge" of 4,500 extra U.S. troops in support of thousands of Afghan security forces.