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Studies of public support for war highlight the importance of context. Most people do not simply support or oppose the use of force but instead assess its merits depending on various aspects of the situation. One such aspect is the extent of international backing – whether from individual states or supranational organizations – for military action. This backing may be active, notably through the contribution of troops, or more a passive matter of endorsement or authorization of action. In this article, a survey experiment embedded in a major internet survey of British foreign policy attitudes (N = 2,205) is used to explore how international backing affects public support for military action. Britain’s military potential and recent history make it an obvious case study here. Both active and endorsement backing prove to have separate and significant positive effects on support. Importantly, the absolute number of troops involved matters far less than the proportion of total troop numbers to be contributed. And the perceived strength of the enemy predicts support only when the British are to contribute a large proportion of total forces. Predispositional variables are used to investigate the sources of the experimental effects but with little success: the impact of international backing proves remarkably consistent across the sample. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on an audience costs experiment embedded into a survey of the British public ( N = 2235). We extend previous research into audience costs in three main directions. First, we provide clear and direct evidence that they exist for a second-order democratic power, the United Kingdom. Second, we show that the extent of audience costs varies, and at times substantially, along with features of the crisis situation that have not been examined empirically in this context before. In particular, the type of crisis strongly influences public reactions both to bluffing in general and to the wisdom or otherwise of escalating crises before backing down. While audience costs do appear to exist for a UK Prime Minister, he or she cannot inflate them by moving up the escalation chain. Rather, a limited use of force tends to mitigate these costs among the British public because it appears to them a more consistent strategy. Third, we show that public disapproval of a failed bluffing strategy is stronger among the more politically engaged, increasing the likelihood that audience costs will be paid at the ballot box. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are considerable concerns about public perceptions of intelligence stemming directly from the highly politicized nature of intelligence estimates in the run-up to the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this article we use a new public attitudes dataset to provide the first ever analysis of British public confidence in MI6 and Government use of intelligence. The article demonstrates that the public have relatively high confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6 but are extremely sceptical about how the Government will present that intelligence. Using an ordered logit model this article then examines the factors that influence public perceptions of both intelligence and Government, finding that women are a lot less confident in both the intelligence services and government presentation of intelligence than men, suggesting that this might help explain gender differences in support for military action. The study also demonstrates that party identifiers and Catholics have very low confidence in the intelligence produced by MI6. The study shows that public confidence in both government and intelligence has a strong effect on support for preventive military action against terror camps, suggesting that the intelligence agencies need to avoid being contaminated by political agendas as much as possible if the intelligence case for future military actions is to be supported by the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on public support for war shows that citizens are responsive to various aspects of strategic context. Less attention has been paid to the core characteristics of the target state. In this comparative study we report survey experiments manipulating two such characteristics, regime type and dominant faith, to test whether the “democratic peace” and the “clash of civilizations” theses are reflected in U.S. and British public opinion. The basic findings show small differences across the two cases: both publics were somewhat more inclined to use force against dictatorships than against democracies and against Islamic than against Christian countries. Respondent religion played no moderating role in Britain: Christians and nonbelievers were alike readier to attack Islamic states. However, in the United States, the dominant faith effect was driven entirely by Christians. Together, our results imply that public judgments are driven as much by images and identities as by strategic calculations of threat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public opinion researchers agree that citizens use simplifying heuristics to reach real, stable preferences. In domestic policy, the focus has been on citizens delegating judgement to opinion leaders, notably political parties. By contrast, citizens have been held to deduce foreign policy opinions from their own values or principles. Yet there is ample scope for delegation in the foreign policy sphere. In this exploratory study I use a ‘process-tracing’ method to test directly for delegation heuristic processing in university students' judgements on the Iranian nuclear issue. A substantial minority sought guidance on foreign policy decisions, either from parties, international actors or newspapers. This was not always simple delegation; some used such heuristics within more complex decision-making processes. However, others relied on simple delegation, raising questions about the ‘effectiveness’ of their processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The simple 5‐point Likert format is ubiquitous in British public opinion research. Yet recent thinking on survey response questions the validity of even the simplest measures. Respondents seek satisficing strategies to cope with the cognitive demands of answering, and the Likert midpoint provides such a strategy. This suggests that 4‐point scales might be more appropriate. Evidence is presented on who chooses the midpoint, and what they do when denied it. Omitting the midpoint may impair validity, because some respondents opt for it when they have no basis for choosing between agreement and disagreement. Yet omission may improve validity, because the midpoint is also used as a safe haven by a ‘silent minority’, taking refuge in that option rather than confessing to an unpopular viewpoint. The implication is that the midpoint should be offered on obscure topics, where many respondents will have no basis for choice, but omitted on controversial topics, where social desirability is uppermost in respondents’ minds. Applying these principles to the 2001 BES demonstrates that varying format by topic thus is not only advisable but also straightforward in practical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the impact of party representation on satisfaction with democracy. Our proposition is that such representation is not only about having a chosen party in government; citizens also derive satisfaction from having their views represented by a political party. We test this through an individual-level measure of policy (in)congruence: the ideological distance between a voter and his or her closest party. Via multi-level modelling of European Election Study data from 1989 to 2009, we find that perceived policy distance matters: the further away that voters see themselves from their nearest party – on either a left-right or a European unification policy dimension – the less satisfied they are with democracy. Notably, this effect is not moderated by party incumbency or size. Voters derive satisfaction from feeling represented by a nearby party even if it is small and out of office. Our results caution against a purely outcomes-driven understanding of democratic satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]