Editor’s Note: Dr. Jessica Blankshain, MWI Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the National Security Affairs department at the Naval War College, recently published an article in the American Political Science Review. In it, she and her coauthors (Lindsay Cohn and former MWI Research Fellow Danielle Lupton) examine the factors that affect public support for various military missions, with a particular focus on mission type and force structure.
Under what conditions does the US public support the domestic use of different institutions of coercive state power? We theorize how the type of situation, the type of actor, the mission, and the type of intervention influence public support for such missions. We use a preregistered conjoint survey experiment to test our hypotheses and find that participants (i) are less supportive of interventions in response to protests than to natural disasters or terrorism, (ii) generally prefer the police or the National Guard to the military, (iii) mistrust order maintenance interventions, and (iv) prefer intervening actors be unarmed. Preferences (ii)–(iv) are strongly conditioned on the type of event. We also find that Republicans are more accepting of military actors, order maintenance interventions, armed interventions, and policing responses to protests. We note implications for public trust in the military, the militarization of policing, and the domestic use of federal forces.
Read the full article here.
Dr. Jessica Blankshain teaches in the National Security Affairs department at the Naval War College. She received her doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard University.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.