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Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused on large‐scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much‐smaller casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests. We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small‐scale wars, but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a war's costs.

Does the imposition of taxation inevitably erode public support for war? Through a pair of survey experiments we show that whether a war tax decreases public support for military action critically depends on the design of the taxation instrument itself. Broad-based, regressive taxes decrease support for war; progressive taxes targeted on the wealthy do not. We also uncover the mechanisms through which Americans incorporate information about war taxation into their wartime policy preferences. Economic self-interest, alone, cannot explain the individual-level variation in reactions to war taxation. Rather, Americans assess war taxation both through the lens of economic self-interest and by using partisan heuristics. The negative effect of taxation on war support is both conditional on the design of the taxation instrument and variable across segments of the public.

Previous scholarship argues that House members' partisan relationship to the president is among the most important determinants of the share of federal dollars they bring home to their constituents. Do presidential politics also shape distributive outcomes in the Senate? Analyzing the allocation of more than $8.5 trillion of federal grants across the states from 1984 to 2008, we show that presidential copartisan senators are more successful than opposition party members in securing federal dollars for their home states. Moreover, presidents appear to target grantsex postto states that gain presidential copartisans in recent elections.

Policymakers have long assumed, and scholars have long argued, that how a government raises military manpower affects public support for military action through two obvious mechanisms: the likelihood any given individual will be personally affected by the conflict, and the expected aggregate cost of the conflict. Increased costs are thought to cause the public to be more critical of the use of military force. But do they? We gain leverage on this question in the US context by employing a survey experiment that allows us both to compare reactions to a range of manpower policies—an all-volunteer standing force, conscription, and mobilization of the reserves—and to explicitly test multiple mechanisms—expectations of bearing personal cost, expectations of aggregate cost, and effects not explained by these cost expectations. Our results strongly suggest that manpower policies' effects are not straightforward. Consistent with previous studies, we find that an expectation of conscription lowers public support for military action. Mobilization of the reserves, however, fails to diminish support, despite the fact that it should also affect more people and signal a larger conflict. While casualty estimates (proxy for scale) are negatively correlated with mission support, personal cost expectations are not. Furthermore, much of the variation between manpower treatments is not explained by either tested cost mechanism, suggesting a role for norms and values. These findings have implications for whether military manpower policies designed to impose political costs on policymakers are likely to work and for wider discussions of public support for military operations.

AbstractPresidents invariably use the bully pulpit to push a political agenda, but whether this leads to political success in advancing that agenda has long been the subject of debate. The increased reliance on social media has renewed that debate, particularly in light of new policies that flag or remove objectionable presidential content. This research conducts a survey experiment that evaluates the effect of presidential tweets on support for executive policies, including proposed unilateral action, and studies the effect of social media corrections of those tweets. We find little evidence that social media appeals move public opinion overall, although they do increase support among Republicans. Corrections generally worked as intended among Democrats but backfired among Republicans, canceling each other out in the aggregate. The findings offer important insights into the efficacy of going public on social media and of corrections to such claims in an era of stark partisan polarization.