Gender Gaps, Partisan Gaps, and Cross-Pressures: An Examination of American Attitudes toward the Use of Force

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Michael A. Hansen ◽  
Jennifer L. Clemens ◽  
Kathleen Dolan

Abstract This article explores the gender gap in attitudes toward the use of military force in the United States. Given that the United States has been continuously engaged in war for the last 17 years, we revisit the topic and explore whether a gender gap in attitudes persists by utilizing Cooperative Congressional Election Study data for 2006–16. In addition, given the primacy of partisanship to issue attitudes, we go beyond examining the gender gap to explore the impact of partisanship on these attitudes. We find that women are less likely than men to support the use of force in most circumstances. We also find gender gaps in the Democratic and Republican parties and acknowledge the diversity among women and among men in these attitudes because of partisan identity. Finally, we identify points of cross-pressure on individuals whose gender and partisan identities pull them in different directions, namely, Republican women and Democratic men.

Poliarchia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 51-95
Author(s):  
Dariusz Stolicki

The Organizational and Personal Framework of the “Global War on Terror” in the Light of the Decisions of the United States Courts The article analyses the law of military detention applicable to the ongoing conflict with Al‑Qaeda and associated forces, to the extent that that law emerges from the jurisprudence of U.S. federal courts, and particularly of the D.C. Circuit. It discusses four major issues: the types of organizations against which military force can be used in accordance with the Congressional authorization, the range of persons subject to military detention in connection with such use of force (in terms of both legal categories and factual predicates), the scope of the battlefield on which the use of force is authorized, and the extent to which American citizens or foreigners lawfully present in the U.S. territory enjoy special immunity from military detention. The article concludes that the impact of the D.C. Circuit decisions on those questions extends beyond the issue of military detention, and provides the general legal framework applicable to other military operations directed against terrorist organizations in the Middle East, such as target strikes or the campagin against the self‑styled Islamic State.


1983 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 604-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Welch ◽  
Donley T. Studlar

This article employs the October 1974 British Election Study to examine the level and nature of political ideology among British political activists, the effects of socioeconomic characteristics on these attitudes, and the impact of the attitudes on political behaviour. On balance, the activist group closely resembles the nonactivist population. Activists are somewhat more ideological in their thinking than nonactivists, but the differences are quite small. Demographic attributes affect the policy attitudes of the élite slightly more than the nonactivists, but again differences are small. The influence of issue attitudes on voting is about the same for activists and nonactivists. These results stand in contrast to studies showing large élite-mass policy differences in the United States and other work documenting ideological orientations in higher levels of the Labour Party.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Gelpi ◽  
Peter D. Feaver

Other research has shown (1) that civilians and the military differ in their views about when and how to use military force; (2) that the opinions of veterans track more closely with military officers than with civilians who never served in the military; and (3) that U.S. civil–military relations shaped Cold War policy debates. We assess whether this opinion gap “matters” for the actual conduct of American foreign policy. We examine the impact of the presence of veterans in the U.S. political elite on the propensity to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 1992. As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines. Once a dispute has been initiated, however, the higher the proportion of veterans, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano Udani ◽  
David C. Kimball

Public beliefs about the frequency of voter fraud are frequently cited to support restrictive voting laws in the United States. However, some sources of public beliefs about voter fraud have received little attention. We identify two conditions that combine to make anti-immigrant attitudes a strong predictor of voter fraud beliefs. First, the recent growth and dispersion of the immigrant population makes immigration a salient consideration for many Americans. Second, an immigrant threat narrative in political discourse linking immigration to crime and political dysfunction has been extended to the voting domain. Using new data from a survey module in the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and the 2012 American National Election Study, we show that immigrant resentment is strongly associated with voter fraud beliefs. Widespread hostility toward immigrants helps nourish public beliefs about voter fraud and support for voting restrictions in the United States. The conditions generating this relationship in public opinion likely exist in other nations roiled by immigration politics. The topic of fraudulent electoral practices will likely continue to provoke voters to call to mind groups that are politically constructed as “un-American.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1526-1540
Author(s):  
Brandon Garrett ◽  
Christopher Slobogin

AbstractRecent events in the United States have highlighted the fact that American police resort to force, including deadly force, much more often than in many other Western countries. This Article describes how the current regulatory regime may ignore or even facilitate these aggressive police actions. The law governing police use of force in the United States derives in large part from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. As construed by the United States Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment provides police wide leeway in using deadly force, making custodial arrests, and stopping and frisking individuals. While state and local police departments can develop more restrictive rules, they often do not. Additionally, the remedies for violations of these rules are weak. The predominant remedy is exclusion of evidence, the impact of which falls primarily on the prosecutor and in any event only has a deterrent effect when evidence is sought. Civil and criminal sanctions have been significantly limited by the Supreme Court, particularly through the doctrine of qualified immunity (applied to individual officers) and the policy or custom defense (applied to municipalities). This minimal regulatory regime is one reason police-citizen encounters in the United States so often result in death or serious bodily harm to citizens, in particular those who are Black. The Article ends with a number of reform proposals.


2020 ◽  
pp. 26-59
Author(s):  
Rupal N. Mehta

This chapter presents the core theoretical framework in this study: an analysis of nuclear reversal at the systemic level and the conditions under which the international community is able to induce a proliferator to abandon a nascent nuclear program. Specifically, it introduces a novel theoretical approach that highlights the necessity to negotiate with both positive and negative inducements in the shadow of military force. In addition to including the core hypotheses for empirical testing, it includes a discussion of probabilistic conditions to help examine a broader set of proliferation cases. These conditions include the impact of leadership change on the association between inducements and nuclear reversal, as well as how a proliferator’s relationship with the United States influences the likelihood of nuclear reversal. It concludes with potential limitations and overarching policy implications of the framework.


2020 ◽  
pp. 113-120
Author(s):  
Mukhammadolim Mukhammadsidiqov ◽  
Abrar Turaev

This article analyzes the impact of neoconservative ideology on the formation of national security paradigms in the United States and reveals the impact of views and ideas put forward by U.S. neoconservatives on the formation of public administration, especially security goals in domestic and foreign policy. In particular, the role of Albert Walstetter, a well-known proponent of neoconservative views, in the formation of security concepts is discussed. The role of political philosopher Leo Strauss’s political-philosophical and military-strategic approaches in the development of neoconservative ideology and the conceptual basis of modern security problems are theoretically analyzed. It is emphasized that the assessment of the impact of neoconservative ideology on the formation of security policy in the development of political processes related to public administration in the United States depends on understanding the content of formed neoconservative security concepts. Based on the predominance of national interests based on national security approaches in the ideology of neoconservatism, the influence of neoconservatism on the interpretation of international relations as a highly conflicted, the anarchic environment is revealed in the formation of the neoconservative paradigm of security. In the following periods, the implementation of Albert Walstetter and Leo Strauss’s military-strategic ideas under the influence of neoconservatives in the US administration, in particular, the practice of proposing to continue the foreign policy course on the use of military force as a factor of national security.


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