Oil wealth and US public support for war

In: Conflict management and peace science: the official journal of the Peace Science Society (International), Volume 38, Issue 1, p. 3-19

Abstract

How does the oil wealth of a potential target state affect the likelihood of the US public favoring the use of military force? Recent studies suggest that public opinion on foreign policy is responsive to the core characteristics of target states, such as regime type and majority religion. This article advances this research agenda by examining the effects of intra-regime heterogeneity in respect of an important characteristic of target states: their oil wealth. To examine the relationship between oil wealth and US public opinion on war, we fielded a conjoint experiment with US citizens. Respondents chose between hypothetical pairs of target states that varied across seven different intra-regime characteristics. We found that that the oil wealth of a target exerts a statistically significant (albeit small) effect on public support for the use of force, independent of the effects of other regime characteristics.