Suchergebnisse

Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World Order offers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings. Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework, Gender, War, and World Order compares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.

"Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Issues" published on by Oxford University Press.

Although previous studies have examined U.S. public support for the use of military force in particular historical cases, and have even made limited comparisons among cases, a full comparison of a large number of historical episodes in which the United States contemplated, threatened, or actually used military force has been missing. An analysis of U.S. public support for the use of military force in twenty-two historical episodes from the early 1980s through the Iraq war and occupation (2003-05) underscores the continuing relevance of Bruce Jentleson's principal policy objectives framework: the objective for which military force is used is an important determinant of the base level of public support. The U.S. public supports restraining aggressive adversaries, but it is leery of involvement in civil-war situations. Although the objective of the mission strongly conditions this base level of support, the public is also sensitive to the relative risk of different military actions; to the prospect of civilian or military casualties; to multilateral participation in the mission; and to the likelihood of success or failure of the mission. These results suggest that support for U.S. military involvement in Iraq is unlikely to increase; indeed, given the ongoing civil strife in Iraq, continuing casualties, and substantial disagreement about the prospects for success, the public's support is likely to remain low or even decline.