War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy by Matthew A. Baum & Philip B K Potter

Author:Matthew A. Baum & Philip B K Potter [Baum, Matthew A. & Potter, Philip B K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Media Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Political Process, Political Freedom, General
ISBN: 9781400866472
Google: udTyBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 24827680
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

Evidence from the Iraq and Afghanistan cases suggest that, as we found in our studies of conflict initiation and reciprocation in the prior two chapters, the media influence states’ conflict behavior in differing ways and to varying degrees, depending in part on the institutional environment in which they operate. In multiparty states, increased public access to television reduced public support for, and the propensity to commit troops to, the respective conflicts. In contrast, greater media access in two-party states is associated with lower opposition and higher troop commitments, but there is a weaker link between the two. This again is consistent with the Downsian Premise, which holds that multiparty systems promote policy-centric media coverage of politics, which in turn empowers citizens to more effectively monitor their leaders’ activities. Because citizens in multiparty democracies are more likely to encounter information conflicting with their leaders’ preferred framing of foreign conflicts, they are more likely to punish leaders who engage in risky foreign adventures and fail. Consequently, media coverage in most instances weighs more heavily on leaders’ political calculations in multi-party than in two-party states. Variations in press freedom alone are insufficient to account for these patterns.

In the next chapter, we turn from our investigations of conflict decision making by democratic governments to in-depth testing of the Downsian Premise, which underlies our theoretical argument.

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