Elites, Events and British Support for the War in Afghanistan

Douglas Kriner

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Boston University

dkriner@bu.edu

Graham Wilson

Professor of Political Science

Boston University

gkwilson@bu.edu

Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Washington, D.C., September 2-5, 2010.

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Abstract

Studies of the dynamics driving public support for war have largely split into two camps, one

emphasizing the importance of unmediated conflict events and the other of elite discourse. To

test the explanatory power of each perspective, we marshal a wide range of aggregate,

individual-level and experimental survey data concerning British support for the war in

Afghanistan. We find little support for event-response theories. With respect to elite theories,

the data is more mixed. At the individual level, we find modest evidence consistent with elite

opinion leadership; politically aware partisans are more supportive of the war in Afghanistan

than are their peers who are less attuned to politics and therefore less exposed to elite cues.

Similarly, our experiments show that even modest elite cues continue to influence support for

war among some segments of the public. However, the aggregate level of war support is

strikingly low throughout most of the period, despite the strong elite consensus in support of the

war effort. Thus, elite discourse does appear to influence opinion, but only at the margins

around a surprisingly low mean level of public support.

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Few topics in political science have received as intensive and sustained attention over the

past thirty years-five years as the dynamics governing popular support for war. At least since

Kant (1795), theorists and political analysts alike have posited that public opinion in a

democratic republic provides one of the strongest checks on politicians’ impulse to adopt

aggressive and costly military policies. Many contemporary theories of the influence of

domestic politics on military policymaking – whether they emphasize domestic institutional

constraints on foreign policy executives (Morgan and Campbell 1991; Maoz and Russett 1993;

Siverson 1995; Clark 2000; Howell and Pevehouse 2007; Kriner 2010), the domestic audience

costs that leaders face when they fail to follow through on a threat to use force (Fearon 1994;

Smith 1998), or the ultimate threat of removal from office at the ballot box (Bueno de Mesquita

and Lalman 1992; Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995; Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow et al.

1999; Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow et al. 2003) – rely on public opinion, either explicitly or

implicitly, as one of the most important mechanisms through which political pressure is brought

to bear on decision-makers to moderate their conduct of military affairs.

Two main schools of thought dominate the wartime opinion literature. The first

emphasizes the role of unmediated conflict events in driving fluctuations in popular support for

war. Citizens are held to update their cost-benefit calculations in response to casualties and other

battlefield events when deciding whether to back an ongoing war.1 The second strand stresses

the critical importance of the cues sent by political elites in shaping popular attitudes toward

military conflict. While a growing number of studies has begun to probe the conditional nature

of elite influence on war support (Berinsky 2007, 2009; Groeling and Baum 2008; Baum and

Groeling 2009; Kriner and Howell 2010), one of the most important and consistent empirical

1 Although the military commonly uses the word casualty to refer to both fatal and non-fatal casualties, following

the standard usage in political science (e.g. Gartner and Segura 1998, Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler 2009), this paper

uses the term to refer only to military fatalities.

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findings of this literature is that elite consensus bolsters public support for war, while elite

dissension causes the erosion of public support for a military conflict.

The proposed causal processes of both of these theories of wartime opinion formation

and change should hold generally in any democratic nation with a free press and an

institutionalized opposition party. However, most empirical assessments of these theoretical

perspectives have focused on the American case. There are reasons for this, not the least of

which being the paucity of comprehensive opinion data in many other contexts. However,

because of this lacuna, scholars have lost an important opportunity to assess theories of opinion

formation in different political and social contexts.

This paper marshals a wide range of public opinion data on British support for the war in

Afghanistan. At both the aggregate and individual levels, we look for evidence consistent with

theories of elite opinion leadership. We also assess whether patterns of British war support in

the aggregate match the expectations generated by an event-response perspective emphasizing

the importance of casualties. Finally, we complement this analysis of observational data with an

original survey experiment to assess the influence of different elite cues on different partisan

publics’ support for continuing the British military commitment in Afghanistan.

The paper proceeds in five parts. Part 1 reviews the relevant literatures emphasizing

conflict events and elite discourse as the principal drivers of war support among the general

public. Part 2 applies these perspectives to the British case in Afghanistan and develops precise

theoretical expectations for each theory. Part 3 assesses these competing expectations against all

available aggregate-level opinion data on British support for the war. Part 4 analyzes individual-

level survey data from the British Election Study to test further empirical expectations derived

from the elite opinion leadership hypothesis. Specifically, it examines whether respondents more

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attuned to politics, and therefore more receptive to elite cues, are more supportive of the war than

their peers with otherwise identical characteristics who are less attentive to political happenings.

Finally, part 5 presents the results of an original survey experiment conducted with a

representative sample of the British public in August 2010 to assess the influence of elite cues

about the proper course in Afghanistan on support for war in the new era of the Coalition

government.

Events vs. Elites as Drivers of War Support

Many scholars conceptualize the wartime opinion formation process as the result of a

cost-benefit calculation akin to those made by policymakers. Battlefield events inform both

citizens’ estimate of the current costs of a military action and of those that likely must be paid to

achieve the mission’s objectives (Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler 2009, Eichenberg 2005). Since

Mueller’s seminal work (1973), much, though not all, of this literature has focused on the

importance of combat casualties in driving opinion change. According to Scott Gartner (2008,

99), “casualties represent the primary information individuals use to evaluate war, assess past

costs, estimate future costs, and formulate their positions.”

In a host of major American military actions from the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars to

smaller engagements including the peacekeeping mission in Somalia and the 1991 Persian Gulf

War, studies have shown very strong inverse correlations between the log of cumulative

American casualties and public support for the military action (Mueller 1973, Larson 1996,

Mueller 1994, Voeten and Brewer 2006, Eichenberg, Stoll and Lebo 2006). Other studies have

emphasized the importance of short-term shocks in casualties to understanding fluctuations in

war support (Gartner and Segura 1998), while still others have shown that differences in local

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casualty rates significantly affects spatial variance in war support across the country (Gartner,

Segura and Wilkening 1997, Kriner and Shen 2010).

According to this event-response literature, battlefield events – and, perhaps most

importantly because of their prominence, combat casualties – drive war support by shaping

citizens’ cost-benefit calculations. Small casualty totals and other signs of tangible military

success on the ground bolster public support for war; by contrast, mounting casualties and

military setbacks in theater tilt the scale in the opposite direction and cause war support to wane.

Other scholars emphasize instead the importance of elite cues to driving patterns in

popular support for war. Most such theories begin with the venerable Almond-Lippmann

consensus (Almond 1950, Lippmann 1992): the public is largely a tabula rasa on foreign affairs.

Whereas in domestic policy matters most citizens have some background information or can at

least rely on pocketbook and other heuristics to guide their opinions, public knowledge of and

attention to foreign affairs is extraordinarily limited. As a result, citizens look to political elites

both for information on a war’s progress and for an interpretive framework to guide their

processing of such events.

One of the most important theoretical and consistent empirical results to emerge from this

elite-centered literature is that elite consensus bolsters support for the use of force while elite

dissension undermines it. For example, in an analysis of dozens of rally around the flag events

from the 1940s through 1980s, Brody (1991) finds that when Congress supported the president’s

actions, the public rallied behind the Commander in Chief. However, when opposition leaders in

the legislature did not back the president’s handling of a crisis, no such rally materialized (see

also Lian and Oneal 1991). Zaller’s RAS model of information processing leads to a similar

prediction for war support more generally. Elite consensus produces a one-sided information

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flow in which identifiers of both parties receive cues from trusted elites supporting the war

effort. This, in turn, produces a “mainstream pattern” in which support increases among

members of both the president’s party and the opposition party as respondents’ political

awareness increases. By contrast, elite dissension leads to a two-sided information flow, as the

media reports conflicting cues from party elites concerning war conduct. This, in turn, leads to a

“polarization pattern” in which war opinion diverges between identifiers of the major parties as

political awareness increases. Citizens whose co-partisan elites vocally support the war become

more supportive as political awareness increases, while those whose co-partisan elites oppose it

become less so. Zaller finds evidence of both patterns within the Vietnam War. During the

period of bipartisan consensus before the Tet offensive, war support remained high and little gap

emerged between party identifiers. By contrast, after Tet when elites began to diverge in their

assessments of the war, a polarization pattern began to emerge.

Recently, Berinsky (2007, 2009) has adapted this perspective and applied it to the very

different contexts of World War II and the war in Iraq. Exploiting variance in party positions in

the lead up to World War II, Berinsky shows that a significant partisan gap emerged in support

for American involvement in World War II when elites were divided, but that this gap

disappeared when the Republicans nominated the interventionist candidate Wendell Wilkie in

1940. Berinsky also argues that this elite consensus explains the high levels of public support

throughout the war, despite the massive number of American casualties sustained. In Iraq,

Berinsky finds strong evidence of partisan polarization in war support even before Democrats

took a strong stand against the war. The lack of consensus and vocal Democratic elite support

for the war, Berinsky shows, allowed Democratic identifiers to define their opinions in

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apposition to those of President Bush, whose support among Democrats was already strikingly

low (see also Kriner and Howell 2010).

Across multiple contexts, then, this literature argues that the cues transmitted by political

elites guide the opinions of a public ill-equipped to judge the merits of foreign policy events

independently.

Theoretical Expectations

Events

According to event-response theories, public support for war should largely follow the

development of events on the ground. When military progress is being made and the costs of the

mission are low, public support should remain high and stable. However, as the military meets

setbacks and the costs of a conflict increase, support should begin to wane. In this paper, we

focus exclusively on combat casualties, which provide the most-often used metric of conditions

on the ground that might affect popular support for war. If casualties drive public opinion, then

support for the UK mission in Afghanistan should remain high until spikes in the casualty rate or

the gradual accumulation of battle deaths cause it to erode.

Figure 1 presents both the number of British casualties sustained in Afghanistan in each

month as well as the cumulative death total for British forces throughout the nine-year course of

the war. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the figure is the very low number of British

casualties in the war prior to the fall of 2006. The first real spikes in British casualties occurred

in August and September of that year. This corresponds with the beginning of Operation

Mountain Fury, which was designed to clear Taliban insurgents out of their strongholds in the

eastern provinces of the country. After this turning point, monthly casualty counts are

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considerably larger, though there is significant monthly variance; by extension, the cumulative

death toll begins to rise during this period, and it accelerates with the heavy fighting of 2008 and

2009. The public repatriation ceremonies in Wootton Bassett, which received extensive media

coverage, also began in 2007; these ceremonies heightened media interest in and attention to the

war and transmitted to the public highly visible images of flag-draped caskets in hearses that

served as a stark reminder of the war’s human toll.2

<< Figure 1 About Here >>

If similar relationships hold between casualties and British support for the war in

Afghanistan as have been observed in multiple American wars, then at the aggregate level

support for the war should remain high through 2006. This support, however, should begin to

erode in the war’s later stages as both cumulative and marginal British casualties increase.

Elites

By contrast, if elite opinion leadership is the driving force behind patterns of war support,

then the presence or absence of elite consensus behind the war effort should govern the expected

level of public approval for the Afghan war at any moment in time. This leads to a very different

expected temporal pattern of British war support than that posited by event-based theories

emphasizing the importance of combat casualties.

From its start in October, 2001 onwards, the British political elite was united in support

of the Afghan War. Leaders of all the major political parties were clear in their support for

military action against Al Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that was sheltering it. It

is perhaps worth quoting from Hansard for the 7th

of October when the Prime Minister

2 See, for example, Steven Morris, “Bodies of British Soldiers Killed by Afghan Policemen Brought Home.” The

Guardian, November 10, 2009.

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announced that military action had begun. Mr. Blair, the Prime Minister and Labour Party leader,

argued that “British and American armed forces with the support of other allies” had started their

attacks and argued that the 9-11 attacks on the United States was not just an attack on American

but “on civilized values everywhere.” Britain would be resolute until the victory was secured that

would mark “not the victory of revenge but the victory of justice over the evil of terrorism.”

(Column 811) Mr. Ian Duncan Smith, Leader of the Conservative Party, immediately offered his

support. “No one should doubt the determination of the British people to see this through to a

successful conclusion. Our future security and well being require no less.” (Column 815) The

Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Mr. Charles Kennedy, was also clear that this was a necessary

and just war. “….may I fully associate Liberal Democratic Members with the support and

concern for our armed forces that have been so properly expressed at this most difficult and

dangerous of times?.......The military strikes of the last 24 hours are sad. Indeed, we all consider

them tragic but they are none the less inevitable….We are correct to pursue military action but

unlike the terrorists, we will continue to display mercy.”(Column 817.)

This united front was unsurprising. Britons had been genuinely shocked and horrified by

the 9-11 attacks. Indeed, sixty seven of the victims were British, making 9-11 one of the major

losses of British lives to terrorism. Important traditions of British foreign policy also supported

active British military support for the United States. First, the American alliance had nearly

always been the primary foreign policy priority of the UK. Second, the UK had long been an

active proponent of collective security and NATO in particular; in responding to 9-11, for the

first time in its history, NATO invoked the “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us”

clause in its founding treaty. The Afghan War therefore began with the political leaders of the

nation united, even though they also recognized that the war could be lengthy.

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Equally importantly, this unanimity was not limited to the immediate aftermath of the

mission’s commencement, but has continued through multiple election campaigns to the present

day. In 2010, the Labour Manifesto argued that “if Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Al Qaeda

would regroup and Pakistan’s stability and our national security would be threatened.” It also

emphasized that Labour had “met every request for extra equipment for Afghanistan.” Similarly,

the Conservative manifesto emphasized the Party’s commitment to the transatlantic alliances

“which is as necessary in 2010 as ever in order to make progress in Afghanistan.” In 2009, Liam

Fox, the Conservative Party spokesman on foreign policy issues, argued that “We are in

Afghanistan out of necessity, not out of choice.” (28 September 2009) The Liberal Democratic

manifesto also committed the party to be “critical supporters of the Afghanistan mission. The

military surge must be accompanied by a strategy to secure a more legitimate government tackle

corruption and win over moderate elements…” The party leaders expressed similar sentiments

during the 2010 campaign debates.

Thus the British political elite united behind the Afghan War early, and this elite

consensus has remained unshaken over the intervening years. In stark contrast to the

demonstrations and backbench revolts that helped shape British support for the Iraq War (Clarke,

Sanders, Stewart, and Whiteley 2009), significant elite opposition never materialized against the

war in Afghanistan.

At the aggregate level, theories emphasizing the importance of elite consensus versus

elite dissension would therefore lead us to expect strong, stable levels of British public support

for the Afghan war throughout its course. At the individual level, we should also expect to find

evidence consistent with Zaller’s “mainstream pattern.” That is, as political awareness increases,

respondents of all three major parties should become more likely to support the war because they

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are increasingly exposed to elite discourse and cues championing the need to stay the course in

Afghanistan.

Aggregate-level opinion data

Because no single polling outlet has asked the same question or questions of the British

public regularly throughout the course of the war in Afghanistan, it is necessary to use data from

multiple polls to gain the most accurate picture possible of patterns in British war support over

time. Figure 2 pools all relevant polls querying British support for the Afghan war from October

2001 to June 2010. This and all subsequent figures also present a LOWESS-smoothed trend to

illustrate the general pattern in changing public support over time.

<< Figure 2 About Here >>

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th

terrorist attacks and the initial

bombardment of Taliban positions in Afghanistan, British support for the mission hovered in the

mid-60s in most polls. This relatively high level of initial support is likely a function both of

public horror at the recent attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the almost

unanimous support of political leaders for British participation in the war effort. For example, in

no poll did a majority of Britons ever support for the use of force in the Suez crisis, which was

sharply criticized by Labour party leaders (Epstein 1960). Unfortunately, the paucity of polling

data between the flurry of polls in the immediate wake of the war’s initiation and the fall of 2006

makes it difficult to say precisely when and how quickly support for the war in Britain fell.

However, an August 2002 poll suggests that, less than a year into the war, support for the

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conflict had already dropped significantly.3 And by mid-2006 British support for the war had

fallen precipitously to well below 40% in most polls.4

This pattern stands in stark contrast to trends in war support in the United States. As

shown in Figure 3, the war in Afghanistan enjoyed almost universal support among Americans in

its earliest stages. Levels of support approaching 90% are unsustainable for any conflict, and the

percentage of Americans supporting the war did decrease throughout the presidency of George

W. Bush. However, even as Bush prepared to vacate the Oval Office, the war in Afghanistan

continued to enjoy the support of a clear majority of the American public. Only in 2009 and

2010 did a significant number of polls begin showing a majority of Americans opposing the war

effort.

<< Figure 3 About Here >>

These early trends in aggregate British war support do not fit neatly with expectations

generated by either event- or elite-driven theories of wartime opinion formation. Casualties

cannot explain the downward arc of British war support in these early years, because support had

eroded to very low levels before British casualties began to mount. Looking beyond casualties,

it is also hard to argue that events on the ground caused the strikingly low levels of popular

support for the war. While some objectives remained unmet, coalition forces enjoyed

3 Unfortunately, the August 2002 ICM question wording is very different from others and the specific invocation of

civilian casualties in Afghanistan may be responsible for the low level of support. The question asked: “The

bombing in Afghanistan had the effect of replacing the Taleban Government and weakened the Al Qaeda terrorist

organisation somewhat but also resulted in a number of civilian deaths. Some people say that these civilian deaths,

although regretted, were a price worth paying to defeat the Taleban and weaken Al Qaeda. Do you agree or

disagree?” Only 43% agreed that the civilian casualties incurred were worth it. While this wording certainly

complicates the issue, it is worth noting that the question does imply that the coalition had largely succeeded in

defeating the Taliban and weakening Al Qaeda as a result of the military action in Afghanistan. Given the literature

emphasizing the importance of assessments of success in driving support for war (e.g. Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler

2009, Eichenberg 2005, Kull and Destler 1999), we might have expected this wording to have yielded a large

percentage of respondents approving of the war. 4 For example, in a July 2007 ICM poll – a poll taken when the UK had suffered fewer than 15 total casualties in

Afghanistan – only 23% of Britons responded that the UK military presence in Afghanistan was “helping to improve

the situation there.”

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considerable success in the war’s early stage, and proponents of the conflict could point to a

number of achievements that illustrated the allies’ progress in the war on terror. In short, it is

difficult to argue that raw assessments of conditions on the ground alone could produce such low

levels of support; indeed, a strong majority of Americans continued to support the war during

this period.

Theories of elite opinion leadership fare no better in explaining early patterns in British

public support for the war in Afghanistan. As mentioned previously, leaders of all three major

parties forcefully backed the war at its outset and continued to stand by it throughout the

campaign. This, past theory suggests, should lead to strong and stable public support for a

military conflict. The disjunction between this expectation and the very low levels to which

British war support sank in the mid 2000s could not be more striking.

The beginning of Operation Mountain Fury and the resulting spike in coalition casualties

– twice as many British soldiers died in Afghanistan in August and September of 2006 as had

died in the mission to that point – prompted renewed interest on the part of pollsters in the

public’s support for war. Figure 4 presents the aggregate support data from all polls taken from

2006 to 2010, and it also breaks it down into specific subsets of questions asking respondents

generally whether they supported or opposed the war in Afghanistan, whether they believed the

war was succeeding/would succeed, and whether they supported an expeditious withdrawal of

British forces. While there is considerable variance across polls, which undoubtedly reflects

differences in question wordings and sometimes long temporal gaps between polls, along most of

the dimensions the data is at least suggestive of a slight increase in war support over time.

Beginning in the upper left-hand corner of Figure 4, the LOWESS smoothed trend on the scatter

plot including all relevant polls suggests a gradual increase over time (albeit with high variance

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about the trend) from an average level of support in the low 30s in 2006-2007 to just over 40%

by June 2010. The pattern in the general approval questions in the upper right hand corner of

Figure 4 is perhaps more ambiguous, given the number of polls in 2009 and 2010 showing very

low levels of public support. However, the questions measuring public assessments of the

mission’s prospects for success shows an uneven upward trend over time. Finally, the

percentage of Britons opposing an expeditious withdrawal from Afghanistan also appears to have

increased, on average, since 2007, although there is still considerable variance across polls.

<< Figure 4 About Here >>

Thus, at the aggregate level British war support from 2007-2010 also fails to accord with

theoretical expectations derived from event-response theories emphasizing the importance of

combat casualties to citizens’ cost-benefit calculations. Recall from Figure 1 that cumulative

casualties increased sharply during this period from less than 20 in June 2006 to more than 300

in July 2010. Marginal casualties also increased during this period, as Taliban resistance

intensified and coalition strategy shifted to engage insurgents more aggressively in the hopes of

building greater stability in troubled parts of the country. The surprisingly low level of British

war support before the fighting escalated and casualties increased may blunt the expected

downward effect of rapidly increasing casualties on war support, simply because support for the

war did not have too much room to fall further. However, in sharp contrast with theoretical

expectations from event-response theories, the aggregate data suggests that British support for

the Afghan actually increased, albeit gradually and modestly, even as the war’s human and

financial costs mounted.

Elite opinion leadership may be able to explain, at least in part, this somewhat surprising

trend. First uncertainty over whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown would call an early election

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and then the lead-up to the 2010 general election campaign itself significantly increased the

number of elite cues supporting the war transmitted to the public. Leaders of all three parties

reaffirmed their commitment to the British military commitment in Afghanistan throughout the

campaign and pre-campaign period. This, in turn, provided their partisan identifiers with

important cues on the war, and it may also have helped distinguish the war in Afghanistan, which

still enjoyed strong support from political leaders of all stripes in London, from the highly

unpopular Iraq War, which had long cast a pallor on popular evaluations of the Afghan war.

While the suggestive, slight upward trend in British war support since 2006 is consistent

with expectations derived from the elite opinion leadership perspective, it is important to

remember that a clear majority of Britons continue to oppose the war in Afghanistan and to

support the expeditious withdrawal of British troops from the region. Thus, while the aggregate

data may be partially consistent with elite-centered theories of opinion leadership, even a strong

cross-partisan elite consensus failed to produce majority support for British involvement in the

war. The data suggests that elite cues may have influenced popular war support, but only at the

margins.

Individual-level opinion data

Most event-response theories do not lead to clear predictions about variance in support

for war among individuals.5 For example, the number of casualties in a military venture is

posited to provide information about a war’s costs that all citizens can incorporate into their cost-

benefit calculations. For some, this information may be enough to tip the balance and lead them

5 An important exception is the growing literature examining the influence of local casualties on support for war and

patterns of political behavior (Gartner, Segura and Wilkening 1997, Karol and Miguel 2007, Grose and

Oppenheimer 2007, Kriner and Shen 2010).

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to oppose the war, while for others the benefits will continue to outweigh the costs. However, all

citizens are held to process the new information in essentially the same way.

Elite theories, by contrast, do offer precise expectations about differences in opinions

across citizens that can be tested empirically with individual-level survey data. A lengthy

literature in social psychology demonstrates that individuals are most responsive to cues sent by

“trusted” political elites with whom they share basic political predispositions (e.g. Lupia 1994,

Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991). Thus, elite-theories predict that the opinions of different

segments of the mass public may diverge substantially if their co-partisan elites take different

positions on a war, even though all citizens receive the same information about casualties and

major conflict events in theater. For example, Labour party leaders sharply criticized the Eden

government’s use of force in the Suez crisis in 1956, and public opinion largely split along

partisan fault lines. Whereas 68% of Conservative identifiers supported the use of force in a

November 1956 poll, only 16% of Labour party identifiers did so (Epstein 1960, 221).

However, if major party elites share the same basic position on an issue, we would not

expect to see major opinion gaps between partisan mass publics. Second, individuals who are

the most attentive to politics should be the most likely to converge to the policy preferences

articulated by their party’s leaders. For example, the first tenet of Zaller’s RAS model (1992) is

that for an elite cue to influence opinion the hearer must receive the message. The likelihood of

receiving policy cues transmitted by political elites is a function of the degree of attention a

respondent pays to politics. Those who are more attentive to politics, thus, should mirror the

patterns of elite discourse more than those who are inattentive.

In the current context, elites from all three major parties, Labour, Conservative and

Liberal Democrat, throughout the war have transmitted cues to their co-partisans encouraging

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them to support the war and staying the course in Afghanistan. Thus, we should not expect to

see large partisan divergences in war support as, for example, have been documented in the

American context with respect to the war in Iraq (Jacobson 2006). Moreover, a respondent’s

probability of supporting the war should increase with his or her level of attention to politics.

The end result should be what Zaller termed a “mainstream pattern” in which politically attentive

members of all three major parties are more supportive of the war in Afghanistan than their less

politically attentive peers.

To test the predictions offered by elite opinion leadership theories, the analysis turns to

individual-level survey data drawn from the Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) of the British

Election Study (BES). The BES surveys comprise a nationally representative sample of Britons.

In the cumulative file, 24% of respondents identified with the Conservatives, 35% with Labour,

9% with the Liberal Democrats, 8% with other parties, and 23% affiliated with no party. Two

questions afford insight into patterns of support for the war in Afghanistan at the individual level.

The first question, which was included on CMS surveys from June to September of 2008, asked

respondents for their level of agreement or disagreement with the following statement: “All

British troops in Afghanistan should be brought home immediately.” The second question,

included on the January-April 2010 CMS surveys, asked respondents whether they approved or

disapproved of Britain’s involvement in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The ordered logit regressions that follow model war support on both dimensions as a

function of respondents’ partisanship, attention to politics, the interaction of the two, and several

demographic control variables.6 The key expectation drawn from elite theories of opinion

6 Specific factual knowledge questions, such as those used in many other studies to create scales of respondents’

level of political information (e.g. Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997, Zaller 1992), were not included in the BES CMS

surveys. As a result, the analysis relies instead on a self-reported political attention measure. This item has a mean

of 6.2 and a standard deviation of 2.5.

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leadership is that the coefficients for all three party-attention interactions should be positive and

statistically significant in the both models. As a respondent’s attention to politics increases, so,

too, should his or her probability of approving of the war and disapproving of an immediate

withdrawal.

<< Table 1 About Here >>

Full results for both ordered logit models are presented in Table 1. The results are mostly

consistent with theoretical expectations. In the model of Afghan war approval, the coefficients

for all three partisan attentiveness interactions are in the expected direction, and two of them (for

Conservatives and Labour) are statistically significant. In the withdrawal model, all three

coefficients are again in the expected direction, and two (for Labour and Liberal Democrats) are

statistically significant. To ease the interpretation of the interaction effects, Figures 5 and 6

present predicted probabilities, obtained from simulations, of war support for each partisan group

as political attention increases.

The results in Figure 5 are generally consistent with the mainstream pattern posited to

hold in periods of elite consensus. There is no great divide between identifiers of the major

parties on the Afghan War, which is consistent with the underlying cross-partisan elite consensus

that Britain must remain committed to the central front of the war on terror. Moreover, the

probability of approving of the war does increase slightly for Labour and Conservative party

identifiers as attention to politics increases, though the increase generated by even a shift in

political attentiveness from its lowest to highest level is exceedingly modest (8% for

Conservatives and only 4% for Labour identifiers). Among Liberal Democrats, however, war

support did not vary with political attentiveness at all. Thus, the data does suggest that Labour

and Conservative party identifiers who were most attentive to politics were more likely to

19

support the war than their peers who were less attentive to politics – presumably because these

respondents received more cues from their party’s leaders supporting the war. However, even

among the most attentive respondents, support for the war hovers below 50%, a surprisingly low

figure given the level of elite consensus behind the conflict.

<< Figure 5 About Here >>

The effect of the interactions between partisanship and attention to politics is

substantively stronger in the support for withdrawal models. As shown in Figure 6, consistent

with the posited mainstream pattern, for all three partisan groups the probability of an individual

respondent supporting an immediate withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan decreases

substantially as his or her attention to politics increases. The effect is most pronounced for

Liberal Democrats and Labour party identifiers. For example, increasing a Liberal Democrat

respondent’s position on the political attention scale from one standard deviation below its mean

to one standard deviation above it decreases the predicted probability of supporting withdrawal

from over 50% to approximately 35%. The effect for Labour party identifiers is roughly

equivalent in magnitude, whereas the estimated effect of increasing attention to politics for

Conservatives is smaller, and the relevant coefficient in the regression failed to reach

conventional levels of statistical significance.7

<< Figure 6 About Here >>

In both models, we see evidence consistent with the mainstream pattern predicted by elite

theories of opinion leadership to emerge in periods of partisan elite consensus. However, as with

the aggregate data, the individual-level analysis again reminds us of limitations on the

7 The un-interacted coefficient for attention to politics is statistically significant in the withdrawal model. Thus,

there is a statistically significant decrease in support for withdrawal for Conservative identifiers as attention to

politics increases; however, the magnitude of this effect is no greater or less than that observed for respondents who

did not identify with any party.

20

explanatory power of elite opinion leadership theories. Particularly in the basic war approval

model, the modest increase in war support that results from increasing attentiveness to politics is

modest and comes against a backdrop of surprisingly low levels of public support for the war.

The effects of the partisan-attention interactions are stronger in the withdrawal models.

However, even at the very highest levels of attention to politics, roughly a third of respondents

are predicted to support immediate withdrawal, despite the forceful opposition of elites of all

three major parties to a premature exit from Afghanistan.

Experimental data

It is exceedingly difficult to establish a causal relationship between elite discourse and

change in public support for war from observational data alone. For example, the slight increase

in the British public’s support for war from 2007-2010, even in the face of mounting casualties

and setbacks on the ground, is consistent with an elite-centered story emphasizing the continued

cross-partisan elite consensus behind the war and the increasing prominence accorded it by

political leaders in the long lead up to the 2010 general election. However, other factors, not

elite discourse (after all, elites were solidly behind the war earlier in its course, as well, when

support for the mission plummeted), could be driving the observed pattern. In a similar vein, the

individual-level evidence of mainstream patterns in war support, in which support increases with

political attentiveness, is also consistent with elite opinion leadership. However, the correlations

could also be spurious, as any other factor that is correlated with both war support and a

respondent’s level of attention to politics could be producing the observed pattern. We cannot be

sure that it is greater receptivity of and responsiveness to elite cues sent by partisan elites that is

driving the observed increase in support among these respondents.

21

To overcome this difficulty and to assess the potential of elite cues to shape popular

support for the war in Afghanistan almost a full decade after its inception, we embedded an

original survey experiment within a YouGov survey with a nationally representative sample of

2,000 British adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three groups. All

respondents received the following prompt: “The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron

has argued that British troops should stay in Afghanistan until Afghan troops are ready to assume

security responsibilities. He hopes that this will happen by 2015.” Respondents randomly

assigned to the first group, the control group, were told no additional information.

Respondents in the second group received the same initial prompt as those in the control,

but were also told about the presence of a wider partisan elite consensus behind the need to keep

British troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. These respondents in our first treatment

group were told: “Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs support the Conservatives’ plan to keep

British troops in Afghanistan. These MPs agree that withdrawing British troops prematurely

would undermine the campaign against global terror.” Finally, respondents in the second

treatment group were also given the baseline prompt, but were then told that Labour and Liberal

Democrat MPs opposed the Prime Minister’s plan: “Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs oppose

the Conservatives’ plan to keep British troops in Afghanistan. These MPs have raised concerns

about rising casualties and costs. They support an earlier withdrawal of British troops.”

All respondents were then asked the same question: “Thinking about the British troops

now in Afghanistan, do you think the Government should…?” followed by a number of options

ranging from immediate withdrawal, regardless of conditions on the ground in Afghanistan to

withdrawing British forces only after Afghan troops are ready to assume security responsibilities,

even if this does not occur until after 2015. To ease interpretation of the results, respondents

22

were collapsed into two categories, those who supported withdrawal prior to 2015, regardless of

conditions on the ground, and those who did not.8 Because respondents were randomly assigned

to the control or either of the two treatment groups, the differences in means across groups are

unbiased. Results are presented in Table 2 below.

<< Table 2 About Here >>

The first row presents the percentages favoring withdrawal before the PM’s 2015 target

in each of the three groups for all survey respondents. The elite consensus treatment, which told

respondents that Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs supported the Conservatives’ plan,

decreased support for an earlier withdrawal by 5%. From one perspective, the magnitude of this

decrease is modest, even if statistically significant. However, the size of the effect is somewhat

impressive given that, even after nine years in which war opinions logically should have

hardened, a modest elite cue supporting the British commitment can still sway the opinions of a

segment of the public.

By contrast, the elite dissension treatment, which told respondents that Labour and

Liberal Democrat MPs opposed the Conservatives’ plan to stay until 2015, had no statistically

significant effect on war support. By 2010, an overwhelming majority of Britons wanted the

troops to return home. In such an environment, the addition of a single, simple elite cue favoring

a more expeditious withdrawal appears to have had little influence on respondents as a whole,

most of whom had almost certainly long since made up their minds on the war.

The next three rows disaggregate the results for Labour, Conservative and Liberal

Democrat party identifiers. Consistent with other recent research emphasizing the differential

responses of various partisan groups to the same elite cues (Groeling and Baum 2008, Berinsky

8 Alternatively, Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests can be used to examine whether the distributions of responses on the

full five point ordinal scale are significantly different across pairs of conditions. These nonparametric tests yield

very similar results to those presented here.

23

2009, Kriner and Howell 2010), the results show that responses to the experimental treatments

varied significantly across partisan groups. First, the disaggregated results suggest that the

effect of the elite consensus cue was strongest on Labour party identifiers. This accords with

past research in several respects. First, for these individuals the cue that Labour party MPs

support the Conservatives’ plan is both trusted (Crawford and Sobel 1982, Druckman 2001) and

“costly” (Calvert 1985, Groeling and Baum 2008, Kriner and Howell 2010) in that opposition

party elites are backing the Government.9 Moreover, Labour partisans may be the most

conflicted on the war, with many having supported it for years while their party was in power

despite other predispositions to oppose interventionist military policies. With the war having

become the Conservatives’, Labour identifiers may be particularly apt to look to their party’s

elites for cues about whether they should continue to support the war even now that the party is

in opposition. Labour and Liberal Democrat opposition increased the percentage of respondents

supporting an expeditious withdrawal, but the increase is not statistically significant.

Conservative identifiers appear unresponsive to cues transmitted by Labour and Liberal

Democrat MPs. There is no evidence of any statistically significant effect for either treatment on

the opinions of Conservative respondents. This unresponsiveness to the positions taken by elites

of other parties is perhaps unsurprising; however, one striking result was the very low level of

support for the Prime Minister’s timetable among his co-partisans. Conservatives were more

supportive of withdrawing British troops before 2015, regardless of conditions on the ground

than any other partisan group.

Finally, among Liberal Democrats the elite consensus cue had no statistically significant

effect on support for withdrawal. However, the Labour and Liberal Democrat MP opposition

cue did increase the percentage of LibDem respondents supporting withdrawal from 54.9% in the

9 Of course, given Labour’s long-standing support for the war, a reversal could also be politically dangerous.

24

control group to 63.5% in the opposition treatment group. This 8.5% increase is substantively

large and only narrowly misses conventional levels of statistical significance.10

This result is at

least suggestive of an underlying tension within the Coalition; if Liberal Democrat MPs were to

speak out against plans to stay in Afghanistan for the long term, it could lead to a surge in war

opposition among Liberal Democratic ranks.

Thus, the experiment shows that elite cues still hold the power to shape British support

for the war in Afghanistan in modest, but significant ways, even though the opinions of many

may be hardened after nine years of exposure to the war. Labour identifiers appear to be the

most responsive to signals of elite consensus behind the Government’s plan. Liberal Democrats,

by contrast, appear to be more responsive to signals of opposition from their own and Labour

party elites.

Conclusion

Two of the most frequently made claims in the wartime opinion literature are that

mounting casualties erode public support for a military mission, while elite consensus bolster it.

When applying these ideas to the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan, however,

important divergences from theoretical expectations emerge. First, casualties offer little insight

into patterns of support for the Afghan war in Britain over time. Support for the conflict

plummeted to very low levels even before British casualties began to rise in the late summer and

fall of 2006. And as casualties began to mount with the intensification of the fighting in 2007-

2010, British support seems to have increased slightly.

10

Moreover, a Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney test suggests that the difference in the full distributions of responses in the

opposition treatment and control groups is statistically significant (p < .10).

25

With respect to elite opinion leadership theories, the empirical data is decidedly more

mixed. The most striking result is the low levels of British support for the war, despite strong,

cross-partisan elite support for the conflict from its initiation to the present day. Contra

expectations, British elite consensus behind the Afghan war has failed to produce majority

support for the mission. It may be that many Britons simply viewed the war in Afghanistan

through the lens of the much more unpopular and contentious conflict in Iraq. Alternatively,

widespread distrust of President Bush and American foreign policy may have dampened support

for British involvement in the American-led mission.11

Future research should investigate these

and alternative hypotheses to understand the puzzlingly low level of support for the Afghan war

in Britain.

However, both the individual-level survey and experimental data do show evidence of the

British public’s responsiveness to elite cues. Moreover, it appears that elite opinion leadership

may be strongest on the public’s prospective policy preferences regarding the war. While the

relationship between attentiveness to politics and war support were weak in the general war

approval model, the relationship was considerably stronger in the withdrawal models. Labour

and Liberal Democrat identifiers with high levels of attention to politics were significantly more

likely to oppose an expeditious withdrawal than were their peers who are less attentive to

politics. At the aggregate level, we observed the greatest upward trend in support from 2007 to

2010 in polls measuring Britons’ beliefs in their opposition to immediate withdrawal and in their

beliefs in the mission’s capacity to succeed. Finally, our experiment, which showed strong

11

For example, as early as November 2003, in an ICM poll 48% of Britons judged George W. Bush a threat to

world peace.

http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/pdfs/2003_november_daily_mirror_george_bush_survey.pdf#search=%22Bush%22

Similarly, a 2007 BBC poll found that 57% of Britons believed that the United States primarily played a negative

role in the world, versus only 33% who believed it played a positive one. Kevin Sullivan, “View on U.S. Drop

Sharply in World Poll.” Washington Post, January 23, 2007.

26

evidence of the responsiveness of Labour and Liberal Democrat identifiers to cues from their

party elites, also queried respondents’ support for withdrawal. This is at least suggestive that,

while much of the British public has made up its mind on the merits of the war generally, it

appears more open to elite influence on questions of how best to proceed.

27

Figure 1: British Casualties in Afghanistan, January 2002 – July 2010

0

5

10

15

20

25

Ja

n-0

2

Jul-

02

Ja

n-0

3

Jul-

03

Ja

n-0

4

Jul-

04

Ja

n-0

5

Jul-

05

Ja

n-0

6

Jul-

06

Ja

n-0

7

Jul-

07

Ja

n-0

8

Jul-

08

Ja

n-0

9

Jul-

09

Ja

n-1

0

Jul-

10

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Monthly casualties

Cumulative casualties

28

Figure 2: British Support for War in Afghanistan, 2002-2010 (all available polls)

20

40

60

80

% S

up

po

rtin

g

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010Year

29

Figure 3: U.S. Support for War in Afghanistan, 2002-2010 (all available polls)

40

50

60

70

80

90

sup

po

rt

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010year

30

Figure 4: British Support for the War in Afghanistan on Several Dimensions, 2006-2010

20

30

40

50

60

% S

upp

ort

ing

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010Year

All polls

20

30

40

50

% S

upp

ort

ing

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010Year

General approval questions

20

30

40

50

% Y

es

2006 2007 2008 2009 20102010Year

War will be successful

20

30

40

50

60

% O

pp

osin

g

2006 2007 2008 2009 20102010Year

Oppose quick withdrawal

31

Figure 5: Predicted Probability of Supporting War in Afghanistan by Partisanship and

Attentiveness to Politics

0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1.0

low medium high

Attention to politics

Pro

bab

ility

of sup

po

rtin

g w

ar

Conservatives

Labour

LibDem

32

Figure 6: Predicted Probability of Supporting Immediate Withdrawal from Afghanistan by

Partisanship and Attentiveness to Politics

0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1.0

low medium high

Attention to politics

Pro

bab

ility

of fa

vo

rin

g w

ithd

raw

al

Conservatives

Labour

LibDem

33

Table 1: Ordered Logit Regressions of Factors Influencing UK Support for Afghanistan

Approve Oppose withdrawal

Tory -0.256 0.389**

(0.286) (0.198)

Labour 0.3 0.095

(0.271) (0.171)

LibDem 0.09 -0.248

(0.418) (0.284)

Attention to politics -0.065** 0.049***

(0.026) (0.018)

Tory * attention 0.1** 0.002

(0.040) (0.028)

Labour * attention 0.083** 0.082***

(0.038) (0.025)

LibDem * attention 0.065 0.089**

(0.061) (0.042)

Male 0.633*** 0.71***

(0.074) (0.050)

Age -0.017*** -0.011***

(0.003) (0.002)

Education -0.045* 0.156***

(0.026) (0.018)

Union 0.013 0.006

(0.085) (0.058)

Observations 2,623 5,658

* p < .10; ** p < .05; *** p < .01; all significance tests two-tailed. All models report robust standard errors.

34

Table 2: Percentage of Respondents Favoring Withdrawal Before Cameron’s 2015 Target

Control MPs Support MPs Oppose

All 63.1% 58.1% 61.5%

Labour 59.1% 49.6% 62.4%

Conservatives 67.3% 62.0% 64%

Liberal Democrats 54.9% 58% 63.5%

Percentages in bold are statistically significantly different from the control group figure, p < .05.

35

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