Who Follows the Generals? Party Polarization and Military Credibility

• In Event: The Military and American Society

Abstract

The military institution has enjoyed consistent and high levels of public confidence over the past several decades, making it one of the most respected entities in American society. However, this aggregate trend of high public confidence conceals an underlying polarization among partisans, who arrive at different conclusions over the institutional quality of the military. What explains the partisan divide in this evaluation process? This analysis argues that a failure of partisans to converge on a common understanding reflects a partisan bias resulting from (1) exposure to different information about the military and (2) different cognitive biases in using that information to render an opinion on institutional quality. Using observational data on news media reporting patterns and original text-as-data processed through unsupervised machine learning techniques, I find that partisans during a key phase of the Iraq War were exposed to widely different levels and frames of information on military performance. While Democrats were more likely to receive information on battlefield failures or organizational scandals, Republicans were less likely to observe news critical of the military. Furthermore, I find through original survey experimentation that even when presented with information on negative performance by the military, partisans adopt very different sensibilities in how that information is used to evaluate it. While Democrats and Independents clearly punish the institution for poor conduct, Republicans adopt an in-group defensiveness in line with previous study on co-partisan affective polarization. The implications of such subjective thinking on the military will present significant challenges to civil-military relations into the future.

Author

• Michael Robinson, United States Military Academy