War and Public Opinion

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course focuses on public opinion about foreign policy, with an emphasis on the relationship between public attitudes and the use of military force. We will study the range of factors that scholars use to explain public support for war (casualties, policy objectives, perceptions of success, elite cues, and values) and consider how political systems, media environments, and what we know about how people process information influences the likelihood that citizens will hold their leaders accountable. The traditional canon on war and public opinion is focused on democratic publics and, mostly, on one public, the American public. This course will leverage key insights from that work but has been designed to be comparative in nature. We will evaluate differences among democracies, and consider relatively new research on the role of public opinion in nondemocratic regimes. This course incorporates theory from international relations and comparative politics along with foundational work in political psychology, which is critical to interpreting public opinion data. Students will be expected to design a comparative case study project and conduct an original exploratory analysis of public opinion data on foreign policy.