Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions

Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro CL Souza (), Oliver Vanden Eynde () and Austin L Wright ()
Additional contact information
Pedro CL Souza: Queen Mary University of London
Oliver Vanden Eynde: Paris School of Economics
Austin L Wright: Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

No 310, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. This paper studies the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the timing of survey collection across respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase the news coverage of Afghanistan and the public demand for withdrawal. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

Keywords: International security; public opinion; political economy; Afghanistan; NATO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L71 N52 O13 Q33 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_310_2024.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2023)
Working Paper: Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:310

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany Niebuhrstrasse 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECONtribute Office ().