Political Research Quarterly Volume 63 Number 1 March 2010 83-96 © 2010 University of Utah 10.1177/1065912908327230 http://prq.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com 83 “Pretty Prudent” or Rhetorically Responsive? The American Public’s Support for Military Action A. Cooper Drury L. Marvin Overby University of Missouri, Columbia Adrian Ang Florida International University, Miami Yitan Li Seattle University,Washington In the United States, public support can play a crucial role in the decisions to initiate and terminate military action. Some scholars argue that the public holds “prudent” opinions regarding the use of the military—supporting efforts to stop aggression but not to engage in nation building.We argue that what seems like a “prudent” opinion may be driven more by the White House’s rhetoric. Experimental tests show that the rhetorical complexity has a more powerful impact on the respondent’s support for military action than the actual policy goal, although this result is substantially tempered by political awareness. Keywords: public opinion, military intervention, pretty prudent public, experiment, and rhetoric C onsiderable attention and scholarship have focused on the connection between American public opinion and foreign policy, particularly the use of military force. This attention is well justified since public support may well be a necessary condition for successful military engagement by a democracy. 1 Recent history provides a number of examples to support this proposition. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Mohamed Farah Aideed all com- mented that a relatively few American military casu- alties would reverse American public opinion and lead the White House to withdraw troops from their respective countries. The case of Somalia is particu- larly instructive. Three days after the October 1993 battle in Mogadishu—in which eighteen American Special Forces troops were killed—President Clinton announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops, fulfilling Aideed’s prophecy. Although many scholars argue that the American public does not know enough to effectively evaluate and hold a rational opinion concerning foreign policy, others dissent, holding that the public’s attitudes on foreign policy are both relatively stable (Page and Shapiro 1992) and coherent (Wittkopf 1990). For our purposes here, one particularly important set of stud- ies argues that the American public is “pretty pru- dent”: that public support for the use of military force is driven by reasonable assessments of the policy goal (Jentleson 1992; Jentleson and Britton 1998). Specifically, the “pretty prudent public” (PPP) argu- ment holds that Americans are generally supportive of the use of military force to stop aggression but not to affect internal political change. Though a number of studies have found empirical support for this argu- ment (see, e.g., Oneal, Lian, and Joyner 1996; Hermann, Tetlock, and Visser 1997; Holsti 2004; Eichenberg 2003), and it is seen as “currently the leading explanation of public support for the use of force among IR [international relations] scholars” (Perla and Felix 2006, 6), the empirical foundation on which the theory rests remains relatively small and limited largely to examinations of aggregate-level data from a small handful of cases. The paucity of corroborative individual-level analysis is particularly troublesome. 2 We suspect that individual-level analy- sis may provide additional insights into the formation of public opinion regarding the use of military force; indeed, in this article, we suggest that the public may at SEATTLE UNIV LIBRARY on March 25, 2010 http://prq.sagepub.com Downloaded from