Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important
question in international relations. In this paper, we study the impact of battlefield casualties
and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop
fatalities, we leverage the otherwise exogenous timing of survey collection across 26,776 respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase coverage of the Afghan conflict and public demand for withdrawal, with heterogeneous effects consistent with an original theoretical argument. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the crucial role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

Keywords: conflict, public opinion, political economy, Afghanistan, NATO

JEL Classification: Q33, O13, N52, R11, L71

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Fetzer, Thiemo and Souza, Pedro CL and Vanden Eynde, Oliver and Wright, Austin L., Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (November 6, 2021). University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2021-52, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3836013 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3836013