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In the United States, public support can play a crucial role in the decisions to initiate and terminate military action. Some scholars argue that the public holds "prudent" opinions regarding the use of the military-supporting efforts to stop aggression but not to engage in nation building. We argue that what seems like a "prudent" opinion may be driven more by the White House's rhetoric. Experimental tests show that the rhetorical complexity has a more powerful impact on the respondent's support for military action than the actual policy goal, although this result is substantially tempered by political awareness.
Keywords: public opinion, military intervention, pretty prudent public, experiment, and rhetoric
Considerable attention and scholarship have focused on the connection between American public opinion and foreign policy, particularly the use of military force. This attention is well justified since public support may well be a necessary condition for successful military engagement by a democracy.1 Recent history provides a number of examples to support this proposition. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Mohamed Farah Aideed all commented that a relatively few American military casualties would reverse American public opinion and lead the White House to withdraw troops from their respective countries. The case of Somalia is particularly instructive. Three days after the October 1993 battle in Mogadishu-in which eighteen American Special Forces troops were killed-President Clinton announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops, fulfilling Aideed's prophecy.
Although many scholars argue that the American public does not know enough to effectively evaluate and hold a rational opinion concerning foreign policy, others dissent, holding that the public's attitudes on foreign policy are both relatively stable (Page and Shapiro 1992) and coherent (Wittkopf 1990). For our purposes here, one particularly important set of studies argues that the American public is "pretty prudent": that public support for the use of military force is driven by reasonable assessments of the policy goal (Jentleson 1992; Jentleson and Britton 1998). Specifically, the "pretty prudent public" (PPP) argument holds that Americans are generally supportive of the use of military force to stop aggression but not to affect internal political change. Though a number of studies have found empirical support for this argument (see, e.g., Oneal, Lian, and Joyner 1996; Hermann, Tetlock, and Visser 1997; Holsti 2004; Eichenberg 2003),...