Principal Policy Objectives Research Articles

Policy Objective of Military Intervention and Public Attitudes: A Conjoint Experiment from US and Turkey

This paper scrutinizes the role of the principal policy objective of military intervention in conditioning citizen attitudes for the use of force. Extending the scope of analysis beyond the independent effects, it next assesses how the effects of two core variables of intervention, namely international organizations’ approval of the operation and the regime type of the target country, vary for interventions with differing mandates. The results of the conjoint experiment in two dissimilar cases, the US and Turkey, show that despite substantial changes in relative support for different types of operations, policy objective is still a highly potent determinant of individual attitudes. The results also concur that compared to foreign policy restraint and humanitarian missions, individuals are more sensitive to international organizations’ endorsements of the use of force for peace and internal political change operations. Finally, individuals are significantly disapproving of operations that seek internal political changes in democratic targets, though in contrast to the democratic peace theory, for other types of interventions, they are indifferent to the regime type of the opponent.

Cognitive Shortcuts and Public Support for Intervention

Scholars of public opinion on military intervention agree that survey respondents make judgments from limited information. Yet researchers still question whether ordinary Americans reflect elite attitudes or instead reach their own “pretty prudent” conclusions from the stated principal policy objective (PPO). This article adjudicates the debate while incorporating lessons from the study of bounded rationality. Evidence comes from an original data set of aggregate US public opinion, covering 1,080 nationally representative survey items about launching operations, across thirty-five countries, during 1981 to 2016. Tests show that PPO matters: pursuing “internal policy change” is less popular than restraining international aggression. However, language reflecting White House cues and one prominent cognitive shortcut (the “availability heuristic”) statistically and substantively outperforms PPO at predicting intervention support. The results indicate that when ordinary Americans are polled about using force against salient foes (Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), elements of bounded rationality can overtake the prudence expressed toward less vivid problems.

Examining the linkages between electronic roadway tolling technologies and road pricing policy objectives

The surge of road pricing projects in the U.S. and around the globe over the past 15 years has been enabled by a variety of new communication and transportation technologies. While all of these technologies increase the efficiency of roadway tolling vis-à-vis manual collection, no “best” configuration has emerged. Rather, optimal configurations depend on the objectives of the tolling effort, such as facility type, geographic scope, desire to price externalities, integration with other operations, and so on. While such policy objectives for road pricing have been examined extensively, little has been written on the explicit links between tolling technology configurations and policy objectives. This paper addresses this gap in the literature through an examination of eight road pricing programs. For each program we evaluate the conduct of the three technical tasks via the nine technology sets in light of six principal policy objectives of road pricing.We find that two policy factors most often determine the type of roadway tolling technologies adopted: (1) the geographical scale of the road network tolled, and (2) the complexity of calculating the fee to be charged. The combination of these two factors can vary greatly – from flat fare tolling on individual facilities, to nationwide road networks priced with dynamic tolls that vary by vehicle class, time of day, and congestion level. We conclude that the challenge to the expanded implementation of road pricing is less about either pricing technologies or the objectives of pricing, but the politically and economically effective linking of the two.

Domestic Support for Wars

This study examines the differences recorded in transatlantic relations from the viewpoint of mass public opinion in the United States of America, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom concerning military engagements in the post-Cold War era, namely the Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraqi (2003) wars. Theoretically, this study builds upon the analysis of the “domestic support for wars” from three mainstream theories of public opinion concerning the use of force; namely, the “principal policy objectives,” “ends and means calculus,” and the “leadership effect.” It also offers a multidimensional approach by introducing a number of variables such as risk, halo effect, multilateral participation, legitimacy, escalation, and self-defence concerning wars. Taking a comprehensive view of the existing polling data on public opinion (1998–2004) an aggregate analytical method is devised and a quantitative analysis of the aggregate polling data is employed to map out correlations between trends in warfare and trends in domestic support for wars.

Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force, 1981–2005

Although previous studies have examined U.S. public support for the use of military force in particular historical cases, and have even made limited comparisons among cases, a full comparison of a large number of historical episodes in which the United States contemplated, threatened, or actually used military force has been missing. An analysis of U.S. public support for the use of military force in twenty-two historical episodes from the early 1980s through the Iraq war and occupation (2003-05) underscores the continuing relevance of Bruce Jentleson's principal policy objectives framework: the objective for which military force is used is an important determinant of the base level of public support. The U.S. public supports restraining aggressive adversaries, but it is leery of involvement in civil-war situations. Although the objective of the mission strongly conditions this base level of support, the public is also sensitive to the relative risk of different military actions; to the prospect of civilian or military casualties; to multilateral participation in the mission; and to the likelihood of success or failure of the mission. These results suggest that support for U.S. military involvement in Iraq is unlikely to increase; indeed, given the ongoing civil strife in Iraq, continuing casualties, and substantial disagreement about the prospects for success, the public's support is likely to remain low or even decline.

Still Pretty Prudent

Extending and further testing the theory advanced by Bruce Jentleson with post-cold war data, variations in U.S. public support for the use of military force are shown to be best explained by the principal policy objective for which military force is being used, with a third category of “humanitarian intervention” added to the previous two of “foreign policy restraint” and “internal political change.” The principal policy objective theory is shown through a series of tests, including regression and logistic analyses, to offer the most powerful and parsimonious explanation, both directly superseding and indirectly subsuming such other alternative variables as interests, elite cues, risk, and multilateralism. These findings support the broader theoretical view of a rational public purposive and not purely reactive in its opinion formulation and have important implications for the basic dispositions of the types of military interventions the American public will and will not support in the post-cold war era.

The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force

This article identifies a “post post-Vietnam” pattern in recent American public opinion on the use of military force. Data is drawn from eight cases of limited military force in the 1980s and the 1990–91 Persian Gulf war. Although other factors enter in, particularly the “halo effect” of quick-strike successes, the variations in public support are best explained by differences in principal policy objectives between force used to coerce foreign policy restraint by an aggressor state, and force used to influence or impose internal political change within another state. Distinctions are made both among and within the cases, showing the American public to have been much more supportive of the use of force when the principal objective was to restrain rather than remake governments. These findings have theoretical implications for the analysis of public opinion, prescriptive implications for U.S. foreign policy strategy, and normative implications for views of the role of the public in the foreign policy process.