Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

In contrast to the expansive literature on military casualties and support for war, we know very little about public reactions to foreign civilian casualties. This article, based on representative sample surveys in the United States and Britain, reports four survey experiments weaving information about civilian casualties into vignettes about Western military action. These produce consistent evidence of civilian casualty aversion: where death tolls were higher, support for force was invariably and significantly lower. Casualty effects were moderate in size but robust across our two cases and across different scenarios. They were also strikingly resistant to moderation by other factors manipulated in the experiments, such as the framing of casualties or their religious affiliation. The importance of numbers over even strongly humanizing frames points toward a utilitarian rather than a social psychological model of casualty aversion. Either way, civilian casualties deserve a more prominent place in the literature on public support for war.