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?
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.
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?
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.
“A smaller, more selective military is actually more effective, [...]”
Well, we would have seen a different outcome with a drafted, citizen army, as well.
Charles Rangel was just used in an argument for rationality.
“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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
Shorter: we ran afoul when lazy teachers started reducing “enlightened self-interest” to merely “self-interest.”
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
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.
Private armies and courts should disallow broad executive endeavors such as the “war on terror.”
Jeff Hummel has a good idea for a helpful check on a bias to go to war (see my summary of his talk here): reduce the penalty for soldiers who break their promise to remain on their job. A soldier in Iraq is better informed than the average voter about how that war is affecting U.S. security. We’ve replaced debtors prisons with bankruptcy for most workers who breach an employment contract and can’t pay damages that satisfy employers. If we do that for soldiers as well, more of them will refuse to fight bad wars.
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