Gender, War, and World Order: A Study of Public Opinion

By Richard C. Eichenberg

Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World Order offers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings.

Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework, Gender, War, and World Order compares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501738166

Book preview

Gender, War, and World Order

A Study of Public Opinion

Richard C. Eichenberg

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Drusilla K. Brown

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Gender, War, and World Order

1. Hypotheses, Data, and Method

2. Threats, Power, War, and Institutions

3. The Gendered Politics of Defense Spending

4. American Attitudes toward Torture

5. Gender Difference in American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force

6. Gender Difference in Cross-National Perspective

7. Global Variation in Gender Difference

Conclusion: The Shadow of Violence

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Tables and Figures

Tables

2.1. Percent rating selected issues as a very important threat, 2006

2.2. Percent who agree that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength, by ideology and gender, 2004–5

2.3. Responses to the statement: Under some conditions war is necessary to obtain justice, June–October 2013

2.4. Percent who agree that when vital interests of our country are involved, it is justified to bypass the UN, 2003–5

2.5. Support for sharing the burden of NATO military action, 2008

2.6. Percent who agree/disagree that country should abide by an EU decision to use military force, 2006–7

3.1. Average national gender difference in net support for defense spending, 2002–13

3.2. Regression analysis of support for defense spending, 2003 and 2013

3.3. Gender difference in percent who favor the European Union becoming a superpower even if this implies greater military expenditures, 2003–5

4.1. Opinions of torture in response to variously worded questions

4.2. Support for torture by party and gender

4.3. Regression analysis of support for torture and presidential approval

5.1. Support for using force and gender difference in twenty-seven historical episodes

5.2. Support for using military force for specific types of military action

5.3. Average gender difference by principal policy objective

5.4. The effect of mentioning casualties on support for using force

5.5. Gender difference during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

5.6. Gender difference and multilateral participation in military actions

5.7. Regression analysis of support for using military force and resulting gender difference

6.1. Support for the use of force and gender difference in hypothetical circumstances

6.2. Comparison of support for using force and gender difference in two hypothetical situations

6.3. Gender difference in support for troops in Afghanistan

6.4. Support for sending arms and military supplies to antigovernment groups in Syria

6.5. Percent approving air strikes or ground troops if negotiations on Iranian nuclear program fail, 2012

7.1. List of historical episodes, number of survey questions, and number of states surveyed

7.2. Support for using force and gender difference for specific types of military actions

7.3. Support for using force and gender difference by principal policy objective (PPO)

7.4. Support for using military force and gender difference according to which multilateral actor is mentioned in the survey question

7.5. Support for using military force and gender difference by national characteristics

7.6. Regression analysis of support among men and women for using military force and resulting gender difference

A1. List of sources for data shown in Table 4.1

A2. List of states included in the data collection on comparative support for using military force (chapter 7)

Figures

2.1. Gender difference in attitudes toward global involvement, 2002–5

2.2. Gender difference in views of war, June–October 2013

2.3. The relationship between the political empowerment of women and the size of the gender difference on war is necessary

3.1. Net support for defense spending and gender difference in the US, 1965–2013

3.2. Net support for defense spending and gender difference, 2002–13

4.1. Number of mentions of Abu Ghraib in New York Times and TV news

4.2. Percentage of respondents who say torture is frequently or sometimes justified, by gender and party identification

4.3. Combined marginal effects of partisanship and gender on support for torture

5.1. Average absolute gender difference by half decades

6.1. Gender difference in support for US drone strikes

7.1. Support of women and men for using military force in ten historical episodes

7.2. Gender difference in support for using force according to which military forces are mentioned in the question

Acknowledgments

Thirty years ago, I published a book on public opinion and national security in Western Europe. The word gender never appeared in that book. This book, in contrast, focuses exclusively on the relationship between gender and attitudes toward security issues.

What changed? The answer is both personal and intellectual. I have benefitted from the encouragement, assistance, and insights of a large number of generous people who invested the time to teach me a new subject. The list of my debts is long.

First, the personal. Drusilla K. Brown, to whom this book is dedicated, has shown unfailing faith in my efforts as a scholar. Equally important, her work as scholar, mentor, and advocate for justice represents a role model for students of gender politics. I am profoundly grateful for her confidence, guidance, and for our life together.

My transition to scholar of gender politics resulted from a number of profound intellectual influences. I had the very good fortune to begin my career under the tutelage of Professor Catherine McArdle Kelleher, who has remained my mentor, colleague, and friend ever since. Catherine was among the first women to receive the PhD in security studies at MIT, in 1967. She was the first employer to pay me for working in political science, opened doors for my first research trip to Europe, and invited me to coauthor my first conference paper and published article. I am extraordinarily grateful for her generosity, good spirit, and friendship.

As the references in this book make clear, three scholars have had an important impact on my thinking. About twenty years ago, while preparing for my class on public opinion and foreign policy, I read a superb article by Pamela Conover and Virginia Sapiro (Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and War, 1993). The article remains one of our discipline’s most important contributions to the study of attitudes toward war. It is a model of theoretical development, survey design, and clear writing, and it convinced me that my future work would fall short were I to continue neglecting the importance of gender in my research. The second profound influence was Joshua Goldstein’s magisterial book War and Gender (2001). Until Goldstein wrote his book, most early scholarship on gender focused on the reasons that women might hold certain opinions, but Goldstein makes the important argument that gender difference in attitudes toward issues of war and peace result in equal or greater part from the socialization and attitudes of men.

I owe a huge intellectual debt to more than two hundred students—most of them women—who have taken my class on gender issues in world politics at Tufts University. I am very proud of the fact that every student speaks during every meeting of this class. I learned more from them in the last ten years than I had learned in the previous twenty. Their ideas shaped this book in every way, and I am grateful that they allowed me to learn while pretending to be the teacher. Two of those students contributed directly to the completion of this book. Benya Kraus and Anna Weissman served as my editors on earlier drafts. Both of them read every word and offered suggestions for improvement. To Anna and Benya, a special word of thanks.

Richard J. Stoll and I met on our first day of graduate school and have been collaborators ever since. Ric is without question the most cheerful and least complicated collaborator on the planet. He also read every word of the manuscript and offered suggestions for improvement. I am grateful for our collaboration and for his permission to use portions of one of our collaborative articles in chapter 3. Among many other scholars of public opinion and foreign policy who allowed me to learn from them and offered comments on earlier versions of this book, I am especially grateful to Karen Devine, Ole Holsti, Pierangelo Isernia, Mary-Kate Lizotte, and Hans Rattinger. Thanks also to Adam Berinsky for sharing his raw data on gender difference in his database of World War II survey questions.

A number of Tufts University students served as my research assistants over the years. Many thanks to the members of this team who collected a large amount of original data: Jennifer Basch, Eric Giordano, Victoria Gilbert, Lily Hartzell, Angela Kachuyevski, Brian Loeb, Tali Paransky, Blair Read, Elizabeth V. Robinson, Laura Schenkein, and Judith Walcott.

Tufts University has been my intellectual home for more than thirty years, and I am grateful for the personal and institutional support that I have received. Thanks to Jeff Berry, Kent Portney, and Debbie Schildkraut for listening patiently as I explained the book’s evolution. I also acknowledge the financial support of the Tufts Committee on Faculty Research Awards for released time, research assistance, and support for the costs of manuscript preparation.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present draft portions of the manuscript to several institutions and organizations. My thanks to Steve Brooks and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and to Deborah Jordan Brooks, Yusaku Horiuchi, and the Dickey Center fellows for very helpful comments on the project. Thanks also to Rob Paarlberg and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for inviting me to present portions of the research, and to Tom Scotto and Pierangelo Isernia for inviting me to participate in the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions on public opinion and the use of force.

A portion of chapter 3 appeared in earlier form in the Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 2 (2012): 336–39. Earlier versions of chapter 5 appeared in International Security 28, no. 1 (summer 2003): 110–41; and International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2016): 138–48. Some data employed in chapter 7 are taken from Janet G. Stotsky, Sakina Shibuya, and Suhaib Kebhaj, Trends in Gender Equality and Women’s Advancement, IMF Working Paper 16/21 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund). I am grateful to the authors for their permission to present the data here.

Roger Haydon at Cornell University Press has been a calm and reassuring editor, and two anonymous reviewers provided thoughtful and detailed suggestions for sharpening the book’s argument and contribution. Ellen Murphy and Jennifer Savran Kelly at Cornell cheerfully answered my many questions as I prepared the book for production.

Finally, I am profoundly grateful to the four accomplished offspring who grew up in an academic household and love to tease dad about it. Elizabeth, Tzeidel, Carter, and Madeleine have contributed to this book in many ways, not least by preventing me from taking myself too seriously.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Gender, War, and World Order

I ask three sets of questions in this book. First, are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? Does gender difference vary across issues, culture, or time? Second, what are the sources of these differences? What hypotheses explain them? Finally, what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences?

In this book I assemble and analyze comparative survey evidence on the first set of questions, but I also explore the causes and implications of gender difference. Overreliance on single poll questions, often within single conflicts at single points in time, have weakened scholars’ understanding of these questions, and past research frequently concentrated on major wars to the exclusion of the study of other security choices. Prior work has also focused almost exclusively on gender difference in the US. In this book, I marshal an extensive collection of global opinion polls on a variety of global issues, in many countries, in many cases over a substantial number of years. The data cover both wars and lesser conflicts. I also analyze gender difference on fundamental global issues, such as the nature of power and power balance and the role of international institutions, as well as specific policy choices such as defense spending or the employment of torture as an instrument of policy. The data presented in this book represent the most comprehensive documentation of gender difference yet available in the scholarly literature.

My analysis of these data substantially expands our knowledge of the extent of gender difference on national security issues. Whereas prior knowledge was largely limited to gender difference in the US, especially during major wars, I show in the chapters to follow that gender difference exists in many countries, especially on the question of using military force. Importantly, I also demonstrate that on some security issues, gender difference is small or nonexistent. Moreover, by comparing the size of gender difference on a variety of security issues, I show that the level of violence associated with military actions and wars appears to be the primary correlate of the size of gender difference. At the aggregate level, it is clear that violence and its consequences are the primary reason for the relative skepticism that women in many countries display when contemplating threatened or actual uses of military force. Gender difference on other global issues, such as the nature of power, the utility of alliances, or the legitimizing function of international institutions, are much smaller or even nonexistent.

My results have both immediate and long-run political implications. At present, a number of ongoing conflicts and crises could lead decision makers to contemplate the use of military force. The data reported here indicate that where public opinion on using force divides closely, it is often related to gender. In the US and Europe in particular, a majority of men favor the use of force in some situations, but a majority of women do not. As Conover and Sapiro remarked with respect to public reactions to the Gulf War of 1991, These gender differences are some of the largest and most consistent in the study of political psychology and are clearly of a magnitude that can have real political significance under the right circumstances (Conover and Sapiro 1993, 1095). Gender difference both in the US and within the public opinion of allies therefore complicates what is already a difficult task of consensus building. Indeed, in the longer term, the political mobilization of women and the increasing representation of women in political institutions could shift government policies away from forceful approaches to international conflicts. For example, Koch and Fulton (2011) studied twenty-two democracies from 1970 to 2000 and found that the increasing representation of women in legislatures reduced the conflict behavior and defense spending of their countries, a result that is not surprising given the data that I present here. Clayton and Zetterberg (2018) found that large increases in parliamentary gender quotas lead to an increase in spending for health care and a decrease in spending on defense. In a number of studies, Valerie Hudson and her colleagues found that societies characterized by higher gender equality exhibit higher domestic stability and more peaceful international behavior (Hudson et al. 2009; Hudson et al. 2012). In summary, the combination of gender difference in preferences on issues of war and peace and the increasing political mobilization of women may herald a gradual shift away from war and violence as instruments of policy.

The Plan of the Book and Summary of Findings

In the pages that follow, I present evidence on the extent of gender difference in public opinion across a large number of security issues, countries, and time periods. In chapter 1, I review five sets of hypotheses that seek to explain the magnitude and variation of gender difference on security issues. I also offer thoughts about what specific evidence would constitute a confirmation or refutation of each set of hypotheses. Put briefly, the essentialist hypothesis predicts that gender difference will be large and constant across cultures, issues, and time. Hypotheses relating gender difference to economic change and the political mobilization of women suggest two things: that large gender difference will characterize issues of pragmatic self-interest (such as a preference for social spending over defense spending) and that the magnitude of gender difference will correlate with the extent of the economic and political mobilization of women. A third set of hypotheses argues that gender difference on security issues is embedded in a broader difference of worldviews that results from the socialization of boys to the masculine norms required of soldiers. This hypothesis predicts that gender difference will characterize views of power, power balance, the acceptability of war, and support for international institutions. Fourth, research on perceptions of threat, risk, and fear of violence predicts that gender difference arises primarily in reaction to the threat or actual use of violent military force. Finally, evidence from several cross-national studies suggests that a society’s geopolitical position mediates gender difference. In addition to a detailed explication of these hypotheses, chapter 1 describes the data that I analyze and briefly discusses methodological issues.

Chapter 2, directly addresses the hypothesis that gender difference arises from a broader difference in worldviews. Specifically, I examine gender difference in attitudes toward international involvement, threats, the utility of power and balance of power, the acceptability of war, and multilateral institutions and their legitimizing functions. I find little evidence to support the hypothesis of a difference in worldviews. International involvement is uncontroversial in most states and evokes no gender difference. Concerning general attitudes toward multilateral organizations, it is only in the US that there is a substantial gender difference (in support for the UN). When the issue turns to the role of the UN, NATO, or the European Union in legitimizing or collectivizing military actions, women are less likely to express support than men are—the opposite of what one would expect, and this pattern suggests that the use of military force is the issue that divides the genders. Multilateral endorsement or participation is secondary. Finally, gender difference is not universal across issues or nations. Cross-nationally, gender difference is most consistently prominent in the US across a number of issues, which should alert us to the possibility that gender politics in the US have some unique qualities. Second, the fact that gender difference varies cross-nationally and across issues casts doubt on the essentialist hypothesis.

I explore the pragmatic politics of gender difference in chapter 3, which describes the historical evolution of men and women’s opinions of defense spending in the US and compares gender difference in the US to that in Europe since 2002. In general, women are moderately less supportive of defense spending in both the US and Europe, but the evidence also indicates that the primary factor underlying gender difference is beliefs about war and military force. Gender difference on defense spending also varies substantially. In some years, difference is large, but in many more years, it is small or even positive (that is, women favor defense more than men). However, the largest gender difference on defense spending occurred in 2003 and 2004, the first two years of a very controversial war in Iraq, providing further evidence that the negative reaction to the defense budget among women arose more from war than by the pragmatic considerations of budgetary politics.

Chapter 4 documents gender difference on a subject that has provoked a great deal of controversy in the US: the use of torture as a policy tool in the war against terror. To frame the issue, I ask if partisanship or gender difference more strongly influence opinions of torture. The findings suggest that, like other opinions on national security issues, opinions of torture are structured above all by partisanship, but this polarization is accompanied by substantial gender difference that at times equals or even supersedes partisanship. The results also reinforce an important argument made by Sapiro: that the effect of gender on political attitudes is context specific (2002; see also Sapiro 2003). Many theories of gender difference on national security issues aspire to a universal or indeed essentialist