Foreign policy attitudes and support for war among the British public

In recent years, UK forces have been deployed abroad in diverse places, for various reasons, and with sharply diverging degrees of success. Given growing competition over depleted resources, pressures for humanitarian intervention, and the number of small states and non-state actors with potentially devastating weapons, the number of possible military engagements seems likely to increase over coming years. Yet rather little is known about the conditions under which the British public will support - and is prepared to bear the costs - of such action. Indeed there has been scant research on foreign policy attitudes more broadly.
This award will fund a combination of survey and experimental work to provide both a detailed mapping of foreign policy attitudes in Britain and a rigorous analysis of the conditions underpinning support for war. A particularly innovative feature of the experimental design is the use of a panel element, enabling us to explore how public support reacts to conflict dynamics, notably changing casualty rates.
The research will broaden the methodological scope of international relations research in Britain, inform key debates in the discipline, and generate a major dataset for public opinion scholars.