The elasticity of reality and British support for the war in Afghanistan
| Author | Graham Wilson,Douglas Kriner |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148116632181 |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2016, Vol. 18(3) 559 –580
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148116632181
bpi.sagepub.com
The elasticity of reality
and British support for
the war in Afghanistan
Douglas Kriner and Graham Wilson
Research Highlights and Abstract
Building on recent efforts to bridge the elites/events dichotomy in the wartime opinion literature,
we test the explanatory power of, and offer a theoretical extension to, the elasticity of reality
hypothesis using the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan from 2001 through 2010.
Marshaling an array of aggregate, individual-level and experimental survey data, as well as an
original database of 2677 content-coded newspaper articles, we find evidence that the unshaken
elite consensus behind the Afghan campaign failed to sustain strong support for war, even among
the most politically engaged segments of the British public. However, we do find evidence that
elites retained a measure of influence over citizens’ prospective attitudes about the war’s future
conduct, even as they were unable to influence more general and retrospective assessments of
Britain’s involvement in the conflict.
In stark contrast to theories of elite opinion leadership, a cross-partisan elite consensus failed to
maintain strong public support among Britons for the war in Afghanistan.
We argue that elites are better able to influence the public’s prospective policy preferences for
war, even when they cannot shape the public’s retrospective assessments.
Analyses of aggregate and individual-level public opinion data are consistent with our argument.
An original survey experiment confirms the capacity of British elites to influence public’s willingness
to stay the course in Afghanistan.
Keywords
elites, public opinion, United Kingdom, war
One of the most important theoretical claims of wartime opinion scholarship is that elite
consensus bolsters public support for war, while elite dissension erodes it (Berinsky,
2007, 2009; Brody, 1991; Larson, 1996; Lian and Oneal, 1993; Powlick and Katz, 1998;
Zaller, 1992). Changes in the balance of elite cues transmitted to the mass public can
explain major shifts in popular support for war over time. For example, Zaller’s (1992)
analysis of US opinion dynamics during the Vietnam War shows that during the period of
bipartisan consensus before the Tet offensive, war support remained high in the face of
mounting costs, and little gap emerged between party identifiers. By contrast, after Tet
when elites began to diverge in their assessments of the conflict, war support diminished
Boston University, USA
Corresponding author:
Douglas Kriner, Boston University, 232 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Email: dkriner@bu.edu
632181BPI0010.1177/1369148116632181The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsKriner and Wilson
research-article2016
Article
560 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18(3)
as the public divided along partisan and ideological lines following the cues of trusted
elites. Berinsky (2007) observes similar splits in American public opinion in the early
stages of World War II; however, this gap disappeared first when the Republicans nomi-
nated the interventionist candidate Wendell Wilkie in 1940 and then again for good after
elites of all parties rallied around the war effort following Pearl Harbor. This elite consen-
sus, Berinsky argues, explains the remarkably high levels of public support throughout
the war, despite the massive number of American casualties sustained. Other scholarship
argues that the balance of elite cues explains dynamics in public support for other major
American wars, including the Korean Conflict, the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, and the
war in Iraq (Berinsky, 2009; Larson, 1996; Larson and Savych, 2005; Voeten and Brewer,
2006; Zaller, 1994). Although the theoretical logic at the core of elite opinion leadership
theory should hold generally in any democratic nation with a free press and institutional-
ized opposition parties, virtually all of the empirical support for this perspective is limited
to the United States.1
One highly salient case that, at first blush, seems orthogonal to the American experience
is British support for the war in Afghanistan. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist
attacks of 9/11, which also claimed the lives of 67 British citizens, leaders of all three major
British parties rallied around the government’s decision to join the American-led coalition
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. This cross-partisan leadership consensus
on the justness of the cause and the need to stay the course through to victory remained
unshaken over time. And yet, while public support for the Afghan War among Britons was
initially high, by the fall of 2006, after the reemergence of heavy fighting against Taliban
insurgents, support for the war among Britons had plunged below the 50% mark. As we will
show, war support remained relatively low for the next 4 years, despite the resurgence of
widespread media coverage of pro-war elite cues from across the political spectrum. What
are the implications of this case for the larger wartime opinion formation literature?
Several recent studies (e.g. Drury et al., 2010; Kriner and Shen, 2014) endeavors to
integrate elite opinion leadership theories with another branch of wartime opinion schol-
arship emphasizing the critical importance of unmediated conflict events to driving opin-
ion (inter alia Eichenberg, 2005; Gartner and Segura, 1998; Gelpi et al., 2009; Mueller,
1973). An important argument advanced by Baum and Groeling (2010; see also Baum and
Potter, 2008) is that the relative influence of elites and events on opinion formation changes
over time. The capacity of elites to shape public opinion independent of actual conditions
on the ground—what they term the ‘elasticity of reality’—wanes over the course of a con-
flict. Baum and Groeling (2010) offers empirical support for this perspective through an
analysis of American public opinion concerning the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007.
We build on this foundation in two ways. Theoretically, we reexamine the underpin-
nings of the elasticity of reality theory and argue that while events may ultimately erode
elites’ capacity to significantly influence citizens’ more retrospective and general assess-
ments of whether a war was right or wrong, elites may retain greater influence over citi-
zens’ prospective judgments of the best policy course moving forward. If correct, this
theoretical refinement has major implications for political elites’ capacity to sustain sup-
port for the continuation of costly military conflicts.
Empirically, we test the explanatory power of the elasticity of reality theory, and of our
proposed refinement, in an important case with non-US data. Data limitations often ham-
per efforts to expand the scope of wartime opinion analysis and test dynamic theories of
opinion formation with data from other countries (e.g. Glantz and Mader, 2015). As a
result, scholars have lost an important opportunity to assess the generalizability of theo-
ries of wartime opinion formation to different political and social contexts. Moreover, the
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