The Costs of Conflict and Support for the Use of Force: Accounting for Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments

How do the costs of conflict influence public support for the use of force? Existing research finds that weapons that eliminate the possibility of military casualties, such as drones, increase popular support for engaging in conflict. We argue that this effect may be overstated because the choice of weapons technology is endogenous to conflict. Leaders may select to use drones in conflicts where the risk of harm to ground forces is especially high. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design in Walsh and Schulzke (2018) across three survey experiments. The key innovation in our experiments is that subjects are led to believe that the choice of attack type—drones or ground troops—is determined by weather conditions rather than strategic considerations. We find that support for military action does not differ across treatments in which subjects are told that the attack involves drone strikes or ground troops.