Race, Ethnicity and Support for War: From WWII to the Post-GWOT Era

• In Event: New Directions in International Relations and American Political Development

Abstract

Many studies of U.S. public support for war have found that nonwhite Americans are less likely to support the use of military force than white Americans, but few studies examine how these differences change over time and why these changes occur. Using a unique dataset of more than 250,000 individual survey responses from Korea to the post-911 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (which we are extending to include data from WWII), we analyze the emergence and evolution of gaps in war support by race and ethnicity both across and within military conflicts. Critically, we explore the linkages between domestic politics and variations in these opinion cleavages over time. For example, the gap between black and white Americans’ wartime opinions was smallest in the Korean Conflict – and the war in Korea was critical to accelerating the desegregation of the army – a major goal for civil rights activists – and making Truman’s 1948 executive order a reality. By the late 1960s, many civil rights leaders increasingly expressed concerns about the disproportionate costs being borne by African American service members and fears that the war in Vietnam sapped resources from the war on poverty and racial inequality at home. Correspondingly, preliminary analyses show that the gap between whites’ and blacks’ wartime assessments widened over time, even as Black casualty rates decreased. We will supplement our analysis of public polling data with an original nationally representative survey with large African American and Hispanic oversamples to test several proposed mechanisms concerning the factors that produce gaps in war support along racial/ethnic lines.

Authors

• Douglas L. Kriner, Cornell University

• Aaron Childree, Cornell University