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Public Opinion and War
Political scientist Scott Althaus was here last week and had a lot of interesting things to say about war and public opinion. Here is one tidbit. The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled. This is especially perverse in that any rational response has got to see WWI as a bigger mistake the more probable is WWII.
Althaus also shows, in Priming Patriots, that the intensity of new coverage typically increases support for war - regardless of whether the coverage is negative or positive. Until negative news becomes overwhelming and long-lasting, more coverage simply rallies the martial spirit, encourages solidarity and solidifies support for the war. This explains a lot.
What checks on democracy are required to deal with the irrationality of public opinion about war?
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on April 17, 2007 at 07:20 AM in Economics, Political Science | Permalink
Comments
The cost is the check. I believe congress dislikes the war because it allows Bush to spend all of their money. Now they want 20B of it back.
Posted by: Huggy3575 at Apr 17, 2007 7:34:17 AM
Checks on democracy?
Well, you could try a very rigid constitution, restricted voting, unanimous state approval for any war, etc. But these sorts of obstacles are brushed aside easily enough. Remember when Congress used to have to declare war? There's a simple reason they no longer do.
Posted by: John Goes at Apr 17, 2007 7:42:44 AM
Maybe it's not irrational.
"A mediocre plan, aggressively executed, is far superior to a perfect plan developed too late."
Perhaps, when war approaches, the marginal value of debate declines in comparison to the marginal value of pugnacity.
Which approach would you most fear in your enemy?
Posted by: Mike at Apr 17, 2007 8:23:56 AM
It's hard not to look at Professor Althaus' data as a natural 'tribal response,' but maybe that's my interest in evolutionary sociobiology showing through.
Yes Mike, a tribe that can work itself into a lather is cause for caution (from the inside or the outside).
Posted by: odograph at Apr 17, 2007 8:30:32 AM
This is especially perverse in that any rational response has got to see WWI as a bigger mistake the more probable is WWII.
Any rational response? In my opinion, the accusation that a response is completely non-rational is an admission of failure and lack of imagination on the part of an economics professor. TWhat about:
"I used to think that we could have avoided WWI through more negotation, and that war was never inevitable. But the failure of the Munich Agreement to secure Peace in Our Time has convinced me that negotation, unfortunately, cannot prevent all wars, and that sometimes a military response is necessary in response to aggression. In fact, the negotiations and concessions to Hitler have only made WWII much more terrible and inevitable than it would otherwise have been had Hitler's ambitions been checked earlier. Thus I was wrong to criticize so strongly the responses that led to WWI. I can now understand the thought processes that led to its escalation, and to other wars in general."
To a lesser extent, you can wonder how completely non-rational the response, "Well, if the Germans are so bad now during WWII, they were probably pretty bad during WWI after all" is.
Posted by: John Thacker at Apr 17, 2007 8:33:25 AM
Don't have a large standing army. It wastes money during peace time and makes it too easy to go to war in the first place. A smaller, more selective military is actually more effective, as demonstrated by the Marine Corps. If something comes up that requires more troops, buy them.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Apr 17, 2007 9:01:52 AM
"A smaller, more selective military is actually more effective, [...]"
Well, we would have seen a different outcome with a drafted, citizen army, as well.
Posted by: odograph at Apr 17, 2007 9:16:05 AM
Agreed. Once people start getting draft notices in their mail they will be more rational.
That's where Charles Rangel comes in.
Posted by: MS at Apr 17, 2007 9:46:17 AM
Charles Rangel was just used in an argument for rationality.
Posted by: Dan at Apr 17, 2007 9:54:20 AM
Yeah, people were able to end the Viet Nam war after a mere 11 years.
Posted by: josh at Apr 17, 2007 10:01:31 AM
"Any rational response?"
Yes. By *any* rational response, WWI was a bigger mistake.
Maybe people who get all exercised about the very idea that a position is
irrational, are just upset at the idea of being held to a rational standard.
Posted by: Anderson at Apr 17, 2007 10:34:30 AM
"What checks on democracy are required to deal with the irrationality of public opinion about war?"
Which wars are you claiming the US population compelled their government to start? Iraq? Vietnam?
Posted by: aaron_m at Apr 17, 2007 12:18:40 PM
"What checks on democracy are required to deal with the irrationality of public opinion about war?"
You could abolish the state. I'm sure that checks a lot state action problems at once.
- Josh
Posted by: Wild Pegasus at Apr 17, 2007 12:53:48 PM
We could go back to the days when political leaders personnaly led their nation's troops into battle.
Posted by: alphie at Apr 17, 2007 12:56:18 PM
I don't understand how the cited data even lead to the final question. Public opinion, on war and other matters, may be volatile, but that doesn't make it irrational. The stock market is pretty volatile, but I never heard anyone argue persuasively that stock prices are irrational. And second, is there any evidence that rationality leads to sounder decisions? If "Prisoner's Dilemma" is a good model of life, then decisions based on reasoning aren't likely to leads to better outcomes than decisions based on feelings.
Posted by: y81 at Apr 17, 2007 2:29:08 PM
Maybe this just suggests that the costs of war are in the short-run, whereas the benefits are weighted towards the long-run, and more visible with hindsight.
Similar to Bastiat's parable of what is seen and what is unseen.
Since you are usually strong suspicious of arguments which cut against rational action by individuals, why not here?
Posted by: Chris at Apr 17, 2007 3:06:30 PM
The only time public opinion really matters is during elections, at other times most support their elected leaders on foriegn policy absent proof of error. What president has won an election promising to lead the nation into war? I can think of several that have won promising to get out of wars, and almost all promise peace. Maybe we could wire candidates for president to lie detectors.
Posted by: joan at Apr 17, 2007 3:49:30 PM
Unlike individuals acting in markets voters don't have an incentive to be rational. See the classic book in this regard The Myth of the Rational Voter.
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-8366496-2696065?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176840086&sr=8-1/marginalrevol-20
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Apr 17, 2007 4:03:26 PM
Uh, we already have a Constitutional system designed to check or insulate our republican government from the passionate swings of popular opinion. One of those checks was to split the war power between the president and the Congress. The framers understood that it had been too easy and too wasteful for kings to take their countries into war, and thus wanted to make it difficult for presidents alone to take the US into wars. Thus, it was up to the Congress to declare war, and for the president to execute that policy.
Posted by: ValisJason at Apr 17, 2007 4:12:39 PM
Geez Alex, that first sentence sure looks like an absolute:
"Unlike individuals acting in markets voters don't have an incentive to be rational."
Perhaps it is a double-absolute, with the claim of "rational" market players and "non-rational" political actors.
The truth might be fuzzier, with bounded rationality at play in both domains?
But of course that doesn't make for quite the punditry!
Posted by: odograph at Apr 17, 2007 4:58:55 PM
Shorter: we ran afoul when lazy teachers started reducing "enlightened self-interest" to merely "self-interest."
Posted by: odograph at Apr 17, 2007 5:00:02 PM
Odograph, I would put the stress on incentives. Individuals in markets have an incentive to be rational because the costs and benefits flow to them. The incentive to be rational in voting markets is weaker. I do not claim that market incentives lead to perfect rationality or that their absence to leads to perfect irrationality.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Apr 17, 2007 6:18:09 PM
John Goes: Congress still has to approve wars. And Congress did, as far as the Constitution is concerned, declare war in this case.
(Well, unless Democratic Senator
Oddly, my copy of the Constitution doesn't include that part.) Re. the original topic, perhaps some of the change about Vietnam is a new generation having come up without the draft hanging over their heads coloring their views, and scholarship on the subject (as opposed to Walter Cronkite's opinion that Tet was a defeat for the US)? And, of course, as opposed to 1972, we now know exactly what happened when the North won, while useful idiots before 1975 could honestly and in all good faith assert that the North would do nothing at all unpleasant to the people who had been opposing Communist rule. Perhaps the influx of South Vietnamese refugees has colored perceptions now, compared to while the war was ongoing? Their perspective of the relative worth of the war is surely different from that of the American media (and leftist protestors), who were the dominant sources of received wisdom about the war... Posted by: Sigivald at Apr 17, 2007 7:10:07 PM
a volunteer army sounds like a good check to me...
Posted by: bastiat at Apr 17, 2007 8:29:09 PM
I'm a fan of Richard Thaler's "winner's curse" book, and Frans de Waal's (and others) work on "fairness" (and proto-economics) in monkeys and apes.
I was saying in the other thread that old ideas of crime and punishment come up against modern brain science ... obviously so do ideas of rationality.
And in both cases, I think we see people making conscious decisions just not to think about that. If we buy a significant connection between our behavior and our hardware, it makes us rethink a lot of our mental models.
FWIW, I think human responses are often gentler than they would be in a strictly rational world. And that's a wonderful thing.
Posted by: odograph at Apr 17, 2007 8:45:25 PM
