Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper examines Americans’ support for sending U.S. military troops abroad under humanitarian, mixed, and strategic pretexts for intervention during the final months of the Bush Administration and during the stretch of the Obama Administration. Data from five large-scale, biennial cross-sectional surveys of American adults (2008-2016) is leveraged to examine the combined effects of pretext, partisanship, budget priories, and ideological conservatism on Americans’ support for interventionist foreign policy. The paper uses ordinary least square (OLS) multivariate regression and binary logistic regression to measure the stability and instability of support for military intervention, connect that variability in support to ideological conservatism and preferences for balancing the budget, and investigate the impact of direct exposure to military culture on support for intervention and on respondents’ House and presidential vote. Results indicate that pretext, direct exposure to military culture, and budgetary preferences affect attitudes toward U.S. military intervention. Other findings show stronger public support for overall military intervention among Republicans and conservatives as well as stronger support for military intervention under humanitarian pretexts than under other pretexts. Americans with a preference for cutting military spending to balance the federal budget oppose mostly all pretexts for intervention and that respondents with a greater degree of exposure to military culture support mostly all pretexts. These findings suggest that belief about America’s pretext for intervention interact with contextual circumstances and attitudinal predispositions to alter interventionist attitudes.