The Domestic Politics of Unpopular Wars : Assessing the Influence of Public Opinion on Presidential Decision Making

Abstract will be provided by author. This paper presents some of the findings from a larger project where I examine the reasons that democratic countries abandon involvement in peripheral wars. Here, I present the findings from my case study on the U.S.' involvement in the Vietnam War from 1965-1975. To approach the research question, I first derive two hypotheses from the literature on imperial overextension. The first hypothesis holds that public support for a peripheral war will drop when the war leads to high costs, such as the implementation of conscription or new taxes; at this point leaders should take steps to end the war. The second hypothesis holds that the public will support a war so long as they believe their country is winning; an exogenous shock, in the form of a major policy failure, will cause a sharp drop in public support, and a policy change. I find that although these hypotheses can explain trends in public opinion during the Vietnam War, they do not explain the behavior of political leaders. I then outline a set of hypotheses derived from sociological framing theory. I argue that when a war becomes unpopular, leaders do not always follow public opinion and end the conflict; instead, leaders often seek to revive support for the war by reframing the policy debate, and inflating the costs of withdrawal. Framing theory predicts that if a leader is popular, and faces no opposition from other political elites, then he will succeed in rallying public support for prolonging the war. In contrast, if a leader faces sustained opposition from his political opponents, who outline a counterframe justifying a withdrawal, he will relent, and exit the conflict. After testing the framing hypotheses in the Vietnam case study, I conclude by using framing theory to offer some insights into two recent cases where leaders escalated unpopular wars. I examine Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq in 2007, and Obama's 2009 decision to increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan