Americans allegedly have an aversion to battle-related military casualties. Their estimates of military deaths may have influenced support for past U.S. military efforts. But what affects accurate estimates of military deaths in wartime? We review the accuracy of estimates for Iraq and three twentieth-century conflicts, finding that the public's estimates were more likely to be on target for Iraq. Then using five polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, we estimate logistic regression equations in which knowledge of military deaths is regressed on variables typically employed when scholars seek to understand the factors that affect what people know about public affairs. Gender and age always emerge as significant predictors. Education and attention to the news usually matter as well. We also show that estimates of military deaths in Iraq have palpable consequences for opinions about U.S. policies there.
Karl W. Eikenberry, "Take No Casualties," Parameters 26, 2 (Summer 1996): 109-118; however, also see Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005 [1996]).
2.
John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973); John E. Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); and John E. Mueller, "The Iraq Syndrome," Foreign Affairs 84, 6 (November/December 2005): 44-54. See also Philip D. Caine, "The United States and Vietnam: A Study in Public Opinion," Air University Review 20, 1 (November-December 1968), www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1968/nov-dec/caine.html; and Scott Sigmund Gartner and Gary M. Segura, "War, Casualties and Public Opinion," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, 3 (June 1998): 278-300.
3.
Mueller, "The Iraq Syndrome," 44.
4.
Frank Newport, "Americans' Biggest Concern about Iraq: Lives and the Safety of Those Fighting There: Americans also Concerned about the Path to Withdrawal," The Gallup Poll, January 7, 2007, www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=26035. The public listed Iraq as America's most important problem from April 2004 well into 2007. See Lydia Saad, "Americans' View of the `Most Important Problem' Continues to be Iraq," The Gallup Poll, June 21, 2007, www.galluppoll.com/content/Default.aspx!ci=27949&VERSION=p.
5.
Jan van der Muelen and Joseph Soeters, "Considering Casualties: Risk and Loss during Peacekeeping and Warmaking," Armed Forces and Society 31, 4 (Summer 2005): 487-512; Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, eds., Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (London: Routledge, 2001).
6.
See, e.g., Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1996).
7.
Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn , "Conclusion: The Gap and What It Means for American National Security" in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security, ed. Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 459-73, 462.
8.
Adam J. Berinsky, "Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites and American Public Support for Military Conflict," Journal of Politics59, 4 (November 2007): 75-99.
9.
Edward Luttwak, "Where Are the Great Powers?" Foreign Affairs 73, 4 (July/August 1994): 23-28; for a contrary view see Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil- Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 172.
10.
Eyal Ben-Ari, "Epilogue: A Good Military Death," Armed Forces and Society 31, 4 (Summer 2005): 651-64; Edward Luttwak, "Toward Post-Heroic Warfare," Foreign Affairs 74, 3 (May/June 1995): 109-22; Harvey Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro, "Casualties, Technology and America's Future Wars," Parameters 26, 2 (Summer 1996):119-27. For a very helpful review of many perspectives on casualty averseness see Hugh Smith, "What Costs Will Democracies Bear? A Review of Popular Theories of Casualty Aversion," Armed Forces and Society 31, 4 (Summer 2005): 487-512.
11.
Jeffrey Record , "Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread and the New American Way of War," Parameters32, 2 (Summer 2002): 4-23.
12.
James Burk, "Public Support for Peacekeeping in Lebanon and Somalia: Assessing the Casualties Hypothesis," Political Science Quarterly 114, 1 (Spring 1999): 53-18; Record, "Collapsed Countries;" Eric V. Larson and Bogdan Savych, American Public Support for U.S. Military Operations from Mogadishu to Baghdad (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, 2005).
13.
See, for examples, Berinsky, "Assuming the Costs;" Brian J. Gaines, James H. Kuklinski, Paul J. Quirk, Buddy Peyton, and Jay Verkuilen, "Same Facts, Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq," Journal of Politics 59, 4 (November 2007): 957-74; Louis J. Klarevas, Christopher Gelpi, and Jason Reifler, "Correspondence: Casualties, Polls and the Iraq War," International Security 31: 186-98; Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, "Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," International Security 30, 3: 7-46; Larson and Savych, American Public Support; and Gartner and Segura, "War, Casualties and Public Opinion."
14.
Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion, 62-63.
15.
Jonathan S. Morris, "The Fox News Factor," The Harvard International Review of Press/Politics10, 3 (Summer 2005): 56-79.
16.
Berinsky, "Assuming the Costs;" Gaines et al., "Same Facts, Different Interpretations;" and John Zaller, "Information, Values and Opinion," American Political Science Review 85, 4 (December 1991): 1215-37.
17.
Martin Gilens , "Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences ," American Political Science Review95, 2 (June 2001): 379-96.
18.
William L. O'Neill , A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 51.
19.
James Bradley , with Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam, 2000 ), 97.
20.
Holsti, Public Opinion, 123-24. See also Larson, Casualties and Consensus, 18-19.
21.
Lee Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997 [1987]), 51-52.
22.
Ibid., 96.
23.
Robert Leckie , Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II (New York: Viking, 1995 ), 2-3.
24.
Robert Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 8-11. See also John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988) and Geoffrey Perret, A Dream of Greatness: The American People, 1945-1963 (New York: Coward, McCann and Geogehagen, 1979).
25.
Hadley D. Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, 1935-1946 ( Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978 [1951]), 1073-74.
26.
Gallup Poll # 510-K, January 11-16, 1953.
27.
"Pentagon Revises Casualty Listings," New York Times, December 4, 1952.
28.
Sidney Verba , Richard A. Brody, Edwin B. Parker, Norman H. Nie, Nelson W. Polsby, Paul Ekman and Gordon S. Black, "Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam," American Political Science Review61, 2 (June 1967): 317-33.
29.
Of course, it is possible that heavier fighting in Europe between D-Day and V-E Day, reports of many U.S. casualties during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, and especially in the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the last months of the war, skewed Americans' memories of wartime deaths upward.
30.
Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics, 196-97.
31.
"Pentagon Revises Casualty Listings," New York Times.
32.
Daniel C. Hallin , The "Uncensored War,"The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
33.
Philip E. Converse, "Change in the American Electorate" in The Human Meaning of Social Change, ed. Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972 ), 263-337.
34.
Polls done on behalf of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press are conducted by telephone, and are intended to represent the voting-age population of the United States. The data were made available to us by the Pew Research Center. We wish to thank Center Director Andrew Kohut, Director of Survey Research Scott Keeter, who gave invaluable substantive advice, and former Study Director Nilanthi Samaranayake. We are responsible for all analyses and interpretation.
35.
Pew Research Center, Awareness of Iraq War Fatalities Plummets: Political Knowledge Update (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 12, 2008). Pew Research Center, Campaign News Interest Dips: Awareness of U.S. War Fatalities Rebounds (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 10, 2008). These data have not yet been released for secondary analysis, so all we can do is report the percentages provided by the Pew Research Center.
36.
Pew Research Center, Awareness of Iraq War Fatalities Plummets, 7.
37.
Ibid., 1-2.
38.
Pew Research Center, Campaign News Interest Dips, 16.
39.
Ibid., 2.
40.
Since the query about U.S. military deaths in Vietnam, and possibly the one during the Korean War, were also multiple-choice type questions, this is unlikely to be the case. Pew Research Center, Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 15, 2007).
41.
See Scott Menard, Applied Logistic Regression, 2nd ed. Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 07-106 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002) or Fred C. Pampel, Logistic Regression: A Primer, Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 07-132 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000) for nontechnical analyses of logistic regression.
42.
See, for example, Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics.
43.
Scott Keeter, noting that Democrats pay greater heed to some stories than do Republicans and vice versa, suggests we look at partisanship. We decided, therefore, to re-estimate the logistic regression models depicted in table 2, and substitute party identification-coded as Democratic Identifiers, Democratic Leaners, Independents, Republican Leaners, and Republican Identifiers-and ideology-coded as Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, and Very Conservative-for strength of partisanship and of ideology. Neither partisanship nor ideology emerged as statistically significant predictors from April 2004 to November 2005. In April 2006, however, partisanship was a statistically significant predictor (at ρ = .046), and its sign indicates that Democrats' estimates of U.S. military deaths were more accurate than Republicans'. The results do not appear to be harbingers of a trend. Neither partisanship nor ideology was a statistically significant predictor in December 2006.
44.
American National Election Studies conducted during presidential races between 1988 and 2004 show that indicators of strength of ideology and strength of partisanship resonate with the Political Interest Scale, which is a linear combination of general political interest and attention to the campaigns. See Stephen Earl Bennett, Apathy in America, 1960-1984: The Causes and Consequences of Citizen Political Indifference (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Trans-national Publishers, 1986).
45.
Age is the respondent's actual age. Education has seven codes, ranging from 4 (for none or 1-8 years) to 18 (for advanced college/university experience). Family income ("last year") is left in the codes provided by the Pew Research Center. Gender, race, and Hispanic identity are dichotomies, coded 0 (for women, African Americans, and non-Hispanics) and 1 (for men, whites, and Hispanics). Strength of ideology has four codes, and ranges from 1 (for don't know or refused to answer) to 4 (for very ideological). Strength of partisanship also has four codes, and ranges from 1 (for other party, don't know and refused to answer) to 4 (for partisan identifier). The attention to recent media stories about the situation in Iraq (in October 2005, the query asked about attention to media stories about the constitutional reform in Iraq) has four categories, and ranges from 1 (for not at all closely) to 4 (for very closely). We will provide specific codes on written request.
46.
All Wald statistics have one degree of freedom, so that information is not depicted.
47.
Nagelkerke's Pseudo R2 is always slightly higher than Cox and Snell's Pseudo R2.
48.
When looking at accurate estimates of battle-related deaths, older people are more knowledgeable than the young, a standard finding when predicting political information levels. (See Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics, chap. 4.) What if, instead of looking at accurate estimates, we estimate logistic regression models for "under-" and "overestimates?" Ten logistic regression equations-two for each data point-found that the only consistently significant predictor was age. But the sign changed. Young people are more likely than their elders to under- and overestimate military deaths in Iraq. It is not clear, at this point, if we are seeing young people's tendency to eschew the news (see Cliff Zukin, Generation X and the News: Road Closed? [Washington, DC: Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, 1997]), or if their political indifference is behind our finding. (See Stephen Earl Bennett, "The Beat Goes On: Political Apathy and News Avoidance among Generation Y," The American Review of Politics 21 [2000]: 299-318.) It may even be the absence of a military draft, which means that most young people need not concern themselves with military-related matters? Resolution of this question is beyond our scope.
49.
Herbert H. Hyman, Charles R. Wright, and John Sheldon Reed, The Enduring Effects of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 109. See also Converse, "Change in the American Electorate," and Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics.
50.
Stephen Earl Bennett, Staci L. Rhine, and Richard S. Flickinger, "The Things They Cared About: Change and Continuity in Americans' Attentiveness to Different Kinds of News Stories, 1989-2002," The Harvard International Review of Press/Politics9, 1 (Winter 2004): 75-99.
51.
Robert C. Luskin, "Explaining Political Sophistication," Political Behavior12 ( 1990): 331-61.
52.
Morris, "The Fox News Factor," 72.
53.
See, for example, Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990) and Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics, 92-93. www.galluppoll.com/content/Default.aspx!ci=27949&VERSION=p.
54.
Berinsky, "Assuming the Costs of War," 979 and Gaines and others, "Same Facts, Different Interpretations," 958.
55.
Ibid.; Gaines et al., "Same Facts, Different Interpretations"; and Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," Political Science Quarterly 118, 4 (Winter 2003-2004): 569-98.
