Please help my academic research

[MBDeac08]

done. Interesting survey, look forward to results.

 

[DeacAtDuke]

I would like to thank everyone for helping pilot my study before I conduct it with a nationally representative sample. Your responses have been extremely helpful.

So, as promised, here is the point (and basic results) of the study. We are examining a theory called "Audience costs" which argues that democracies are advantaged in international crisis situations because once they commit to an action, there will be a strong domestic political penalty for not following through. So, democracies are thought to make more credible commitments in international crisis bargaining because they get punished for backing down. To be clear that I am not taking credit for other people's work--I did not develop the theory, nor am I the first to ever test it. (The small differences I am testing compared to previous work would be of interest only to academics--PM if you want a reading list.)

As you may recall, you read a hypothetical scenario about an unnamed Middle Eastern country in the midst of an Arab Spring uprising. While everybody received the same basic intro to the story, there were actually five different scenarios.

1st scenario -- POTUS says stay out, US stays out
2nd scenario -- POTUS says intervene, US stays out
3rd scenario -- POTUS says intervene, US intervenes (ambiguous outcome)
4th scenario -- POTUS says intervene, US intervenes (unsuccessful outcome, no further military involvement)
5th scenario -- POTUS says intervene, US intervenes (unsuccessful outcome, further military action/escalation)

The underlying idea is to test how subjects evaluate the President differently across these conditions.

The President has the highest support in condition 1 and the lowest support in condition 2, even though the action performed is the same. Condition 5 has the second highest support--suggesting that Americans place a great emphasis on victory (which is consistent with most of published work).

Conditions, in order of support:
Condition 1
Condition 5
Conditions 3/4 (basically tied, though 3 is a little bit higher)
Condition 2

We basically find support for the audience costs thesis--there is a penalty for backing down. At the same time, we find that there is nearly as large a penalty to intervening but not reaching a successful conclusion. Perhaps because of that, there is actually greater support for a higher level of military commitment after airstrikes fail than for airstrikes only.

When time permits, I will be doing more sophisticated analysis. I can post an update then, but it is going to be a while.

 

[WakeBDer]

Very cool. Thanks for allowing us to participate.

 

[HeltonCreek]

I thought you might have been doing something with the color question about whether survey respondents actually read the directions and questions. Cool research nonetheless.

 

[wakegrrl]

Quite interesting. Thanks!

 

[DeacHoops]

I thought you might have been doing something with the color question about whether survey respondents actually read the directions and questions. Cool research nonetheless.

about this question...do you just automatically disregard responses from anybody who got that wrong?

 

[HeavyPetter]

BTW, I filled out the survey about four dozen times. Hope that doesn't mess up your data.

 

[DeacAtDuke]

about this question...do you just automatically disregard responses from anybody who got that wrong?

We do not automatically disregard any responses. We ask it to get a sense of whether people are paying attention--we have it if we need it. We can take this into account in the analysis.

Here's the basic conclusion--people affiliated with Wake pay attention. Over 80% answered that question "correctly," which is much higher than normal. (And I think the 80% number understates attention from Wake people because a few respondents were recruited from other places.)

 

[Wakeforest22890]

I would like to thank everyone for helping pilot my study before I conduct it with a nationally representative sample. Your responses have been extremely helpful.

So, as promised, here is the point (and basic results) of the study. We are examining a theory called "Audience costs" which argues that democracies are advantaged in international crisis situations because once they commit to an action, there will be a strong domestic political penalty for not following through. So, democracies are thought to make more credible commitments in international crisis bargaining because they get punished for backing down. To be clear that I am not taking credit for other people's work--I did not develop the theory, nor am I the first to ever test it. (The small differences I am testing compared to previous work would be of interest only to academics--PM if you want a reading list.)

Oh God, I just had mad flashbacks to Theories of IR for a topics course in Poli Sci.

 

[Wake4estMike]

Did the poli sci department every follow through on that threat to include an applied statistics class as a requirement?

 

[lbE08]

Cool theories, thanks for the follow-up with what we were doing.

 

[Wakeforest22890]

Did the poli sci department every follow through on that threat to include an applied statistics class as a requirement?

Yes it's called Methods in Political Science and is split into two half semester courses: one for qualitative one for quantitative.