While campaigning for the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden promised Americans that he would reenter the nuclear deal with Iran, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), so long as Tehran returned to compliance with...
This is a guest post by Christopher Gelpi and Elias Assaf. Christopher Gelpi is Chair of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Professor...
I have been an admirer of Sam Whitt’s work for some time. He has always done interesting research, being one of the first to study and publish on Katrina and run surveys/experiments on divided post...
The following is a guest-post from Martin Edwards, professor at Seton Hall’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Martin’s website is here. How do Americans think about the United...
According to a new survey I've just completed, not great. As part of my ongoing research into human security norms, I embedded questions on YouGov's Omnibus survey asking how people feel about the potential for outsourcing lethal targeting decisions to machines. 1000 Americans were surveyed, matched on gender, age, race, income, region, education, party identification, voter registration, ideology, political interest and military status. Across the board, 55% of Americans opposed autonomous weapons (nearly 40% were "strongly opposed,") and a majority (53%) expressed support for the new ban...
OK,  the 10-year retrospectives on the Iraq War are in and the debate is on. Yes, Bush, Cheney, and the neocons sold the country a bill of goods on Iraq.  They are war criminals and should be held accountable. Iraq was a strategic disaster, it was a financial disaster, and for far too many it was a human and humanitarian disaster.  Yes, yes, yes, the intelligence was faulty, the pundit class failed, Judith Miller was wrong, and the New York Times screwed up.  The list goes on. But, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen all of this, and it won’t be the last. Read on and be sure to take the...
Per Dan's post below, I don't understand why Russia is our number-one enemy, either today or ten years from now. Neither, it seems, do Americans, who have only noticed Russia's phantom menace at one period in the past several years--immediately after the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Below, polling data from the Pew Research Center on the question of which country represents the greatest danger to the United States; these are not all the answers, but they are the biggest ones. Russia is the orange line. Note that these are free-response questions, which explains Iraq's presence on the list...
A majority of Americans support a no-fly zone in Syria. I expect that  "no-fly zone" comes across as a relatively anodyne, costless policy to the US public. And, indeed, most of the policies that would be required to make such a zone work poll considerably less well. UPDATE: (via) Daniel Larson makes the same point, but with more words.
This week, a number of high-profile journalists and bloggers are engaged in a debate about presidential persuasion. Among other examples, they have been discussing the George W. Bush administration's selling of the Iraq war -- leading political scientists at the The Monkey Cage to weigh in with data and useful analysis.Much of the discussion about the Iraq war centers around this chart, which details the contours of support for the war based on party identification.I left the following in comments, but wanted to add key links:The Bush administration really starting selling war in late August...
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or have other discernible effects, we can say strategic narratives matter. The investment states have made in their international communications...
George Gallup - what have you started? The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can constantly monitor public opinion in countries in real-time. The digitization of social life around the world  – uneven yes, but spreading – leaves ever-more traces of communications to be mined, analysed and acted upon. In a paper that Nick Anstead and I presented in Iceland this week, we called this...
I have long thought that political science Ph.D. students should be required to watch all of Yes, Minister and some of the better parts of Yes, Prime Minister. Without beating a dead horse too much, prolonged exposure to the cynical-but-accurate view of politics the show presents (it is like a curdled West Wing--or, perhaps, what the post-hegemonic West Wing will look like) would prevent people from too easily assuming that the adoption of a policy by a democratically elected government is equivalent to the approval of that policy by the voters who selected the government. (Via Chris...