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How do military tactics shape civilian support for foreign intervention? Critics contend that invasive tactics undermine popular support by alienating the civilian population. Counterexamples suggest that civilians will support invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents are willing and able to mitigate a proximate threat. I reconcile these divergent findings by arguing that civilian support is a function of threat perception based on three interacting heuristics: social identity, combatant targeting, and territorial control. To evaluate my theory, I enumerate a survey among Iraqi residents in Baghdad during the anti-ISIS campaign. Respondents preferred more invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents assisted the most effective local members of the anti-ISIS coalition. Across sectarian divides, however, respondents uniformly opposed the deployment of foreign troops. These findings suggest that in regime-controlled communities, civilians will support counterinsurgents who are invasive enough to mitigate insurgent threats, but not too invasive as to undermine local autonomy.

How do military tactics shape civilian support for foreign intervention? Critics contend that invasive tactics undermine popular support by alienating the civilian population. Counterexamples suggest that civilians will support invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents are willing and able to mitigate a proximate threat. I reconcile these divergent findings by arguing that civilian support is a function of threat perception based on three interacting heuristics: social identity, combatant targeting, and territorial control. To evaluate my theory, I enumerate a survey among Iraqi residents in Baghdad during the anti-ISIS campaign. Respondents preferred more invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents assisted the most effective local members of the anti-ISIS coalition. Across sectarian divides, however, respondents uniformly opposed the deployment of foreign troops. These findings suggest that in regime-controlled communities, civilians will support counterinsurgents who are invasive enough to mitigate insurgent threats, but not too invasive as to undermine local autonomy.

AbstractAmericans are reluctant to support foreign military intervention. However, if victims of violence are identified as Christians, support for intervention is higher. We term this a "Brother's Keeper" effect as Americans, especially more religious Americans, will support intervention that aids co-religionists. To test our argument, we use a survey experiment that randomly assigns respondents to varying accounts of violence in the Central African Republic. Respondents who read Christians are the victims of violence are more supportive of military intervention compared to respondents who read vignettes that do not identify the religious identities of victims. Moreover, these Brother's Keeper effects are stronger among more religious respondents. We also find even stronger effects when extrapolating results as a population effect with survey weights. Our findings reveal that labeling otherwise unknown foreign actors as Christian have significant effects on support for foreign military intervention.

This article presents a conceptual clarification of asymmetric hypotheses and a discussion of methodologies available to test them. Despite the existence of a litany of theories that posit asymmetric hypotheses, most empirical studies fail to capture their core insight: boundaries separating zones of data from areas that lack data are substantively interesting. We discuss existing set-theoretic and large-N approaches to the study of asymmetric hypotheses, introduce new ones from the literatures on stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis, evaluate their relative merits, and give three examples of how asymmetric hypotheses can be studied with this suite of tools.