Polling the “Strategy for Victory”

Iraq Legacy blog posts Measurement Issues Polls in the News President Bush

A story on the front of Sunday’s New York Times shines new light on the work on support for the Iraq War by Chris Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler that MP wrote about  last summer.   With the work of these past and present Duke academics again in the spotlight, I thought I would post some links to their work as well as to some dissenting opinions and offer a few additional thoughts of my own.  One notable problem with the Gelpi, et. al. thesis is the same issue I raised in my last post.  The most crucial questions used in their research probe attitudes which – for many voters – may be formed on the spot during the course of the interview. 

First, a conflict re-declared:  Jason Reifler is both a friend and a former valued employee of MP’s firm.  I reviewed my clumsy discovery of his work on this subject back in June. 

MP recommends reading the story in full, but here is a quick summary:  According to the Times‘ Scott Shane, the "relentless focus on the theme of victory" in last week’s speech by President Bush reflects the growing influence of Feaver, who joined the staff of the National Security Council earlier last year.   Shane also neatly summarizes the central thesis from the surveys and statistical models by Feaver and his academic colleagues:  "Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed."

Shane also goes to great lengths (including a call to Adobe) to demonstrate the Feaver’s role in drafting the new strategy.  "Despite the president’s oft-stated aversion to polls," the administration recruited Feaver after he presented his "analysis of polls about the Iraq war."  Moreover, Shane noticed Feaver’s name listed as "author" in the "document properties" of the  PDF of the strategy document and as a result got the White House to confirm that Feaver "helped conceive and draft the plan." 

[As of this writing, "feaver_p" remains listed as the document "author."  To see for yourself, download the document, open with the standalone Acrobat reader, use the menus to select File / Document Properties and check the "author" field under the "Description" tab].   

Now, some links.  First the two key papers by Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler:

  • Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler, and Peter D. Feaver. 2005. "Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments, Candidate Choice, and Casualty Tolerance."   A companion paper that looks at the influence of attitudes about the Iraq war on the 2004 presidential vote. 

Next, the writings of those who have been critical of the Gelpi et. al. thesis that perceptions of success drive support for the war (or take a somewhat different approach):

  • David Moore. 2005.  "’Succeeding’ in Iraq" (subscription required).  Like Berinsky, Gallup’s David Moore also took issue with the direction of "causality," between perceptions of success and support for the war. 

Finally, two more academics – one an occasional commenter on this site -take a slightly different approach to similar data (though they are not necessarily critical of Gelpi et. al.):

Now, I must confess that in this academic debate, I am more a student and observer than participant.   However, to the extent that these authors disagree, I find Adam Berinsky’s arguments both persuasive and consistent with the variations in survey data on Iraq that I described last week.

To consider Berinsky’s point, let’s review the Gelpi et. al. findings.  They used statistical modeling to show that "prospective evaluations" of how likely the US is to succeed in Iraq are most important in predicting overall support for the war.  Berinsky raises some good questions about the underlying attitudes those questions were measuring.  In looking at American’s attitudes about both World War II and Iraq, Berinsky finds that "large segments of the mass public possessed no knowledge of the most basic facts of these conflicts" (p. 2).   He further argues: 

[T]he causal arrow between perceived success and war support could run from the later to the former, rather than vice-versa, as Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler (2004) argue. Analysis of data from the Iraq War Causality Survey (see below) suggests that, at an empirical level, perceived success is best characterized as another measure of support for war, itself influenced by partisan elite discourse.

Gallup’s David Moore makes a similar argument in his (subscription only) analysis:

The causal model cannot be proved, as least by the data obtained by the three authors; in this case, causality is more an act of faith than a provable dynamic.

Moore’s skepticism about these models arises from essentially the same issue I raised in my last post about questions about prospective policy in Iraq.  The huge variation depending on question wording suggests that a large portion of Americans are not quite sure what they want to do next, and as such, tend to form judgments in reaction to specific language of the poll.  As I highlighted back in June (and as Moore pointed out in his analysis), pollsters get very different results in questions about success in Iraq depending on how they define "success."  A Westhill/Hotline survey found that the percentage expressing "confidence" in success in Iraq varied between 37% and 64% depending on the definition of success. 

The basic argument that Berinsky and Moore make is that when a pollster asks Americans to rate the chances of success in Iraq in an intentionally vague way (as Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler do), the answers tend to reflect their general views about the war rather than specific pre-existing attitudes about the probability of American success.  So, they argue, two different ways of measuring the same thing end up being highly correlated and the fact that perceptions of success appear to predict support for the war in a statistical model is a bit spurious.   At least, that’s the argument. 

MP remains intrigued by this research, the continuing academic debate and its importance in driving the Bush administration’s communications strategy.  The practical political question, however, is whether that PR strategy on Iraq will help bolster approval of his conduct of the war, especially if casualties remain at current levels.  On that score, count MP as dubious.

[Typo corrected 12/5]

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.