Replication data for: Responding to War on Capitol Hill: Battlefield Casualties, Congressional Response, and Public Support for the War in Iraq

Recent scholarship argues that how members of Congress respond to an ongoing war significantly influences the president’s strategic calculations. However, the literature is comparably silent on the factors influencing the public positions members take during the course of a military venture. Accounting for both national and local electoral incentives, we develop a theory positing that partisanship conditions congressional responses to casualties in the aggregate, but that all members respond to casualties in their constituency by increasingly criticizing the war. Analyzing an original database of more than 7,500 content-coded House floor speeches on the Iraq War, we find strong support for both hypotheses. We also find that Democrats from high casualty constituencies were significantly more likely to cast anti-war roll call votes than their peers. Finally, we show that this significant variation in congressional anti-war position-taking strongly correlates with geographic differences in public support for war.

近年学界研究指出，国会议员对正在进行的战争的应对方式，会显著影响总统的战略考量。然而，现有文献对军事行动期间国会议员公开立场的影响因素却相对鲜有探讨。我们综合考量全国与地方层面的选举激励因素，提出一项理论假说：党派属性会在整体层面塑造国会对战争伤亡的反应，但所有议员都会因本选区出现伤亡而愈发批评这场战争。通过分析涵盖超过7500条经内容编码（content-coded）的伊拉克战争众议院全体会议发言（House floor speeches）的原始数据库，我们为两项假说均提供了强有力的实证支持。我们还发现，来自战争伤亡率较高选区的民主党议员，较其他同僚更有可能投出反战记名投票（roll call votes）。最终我们证实，国会反战立场的显著差异，与公众对战争支持率的地域差异高度相关。