Masculinity, Politics and War Quiz 2

Reading: Hannah Partis-Jennings. 2017. “Military Masculinity and the Act of Killing in Hamlet and Afghanistan.” Men and Masculinities.

• Contrast of Marine A and Hamlet: kill or not to kill  

• Gendered devisions → shame gendered to be feminine

• “Shuffle off this mortal coil – you cunt” → fallibility of human life, shaking off life

• Lack of an audience → thinks he is not being recorded

• Military masculinity

  • Used to describe the set of norms and behaviors most valued and aspired to in a military context 

  • Elements such as…

    • Physical strength

    • Bravery

    • Absence of emotions

    • Denigration of feminized traits 

  • Action over thought; agentic traits 

  • dehumanization; disconnect from the other

    • relaitonality in war

    • grievability of human life

• Alexander Blackman → 2011 Helmand province killing, first British soldier to be convicted of battlefield murder since WW2 

  • Conviction of murder overturned in 2017

  • Reduced to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility (allows defendant to claim they were mentally impaired) 

Matthew Golesteyn

• Former Special Forces officer

• 2010 kills Afghan civilian without substantiating if the citizen is a Taliban bomb maker     

  • Admits to it as part of a lie detector test taken during a CIA job interview in 2011 

  • Investigation by the Army followed by revocation of his Silver Star and Special Forces license 

• Launches public campaign to pressure the military into reconsidering his punishment 

  • Highly publicized interview on Fox News in 2016 where he defends his action 

2018: Golsteyn facing court martial → Julie (new wife, schoolteacher) does an interview on Fox News with one of its rising stars aka Pete Hegseth

• Hegseth links his criticisms of the US military to broader culture war 

  • “Within the Republican base, a new ecosystem had emerged of outspoken veterans, one that was fusing with the movement around President Trump. As podcasters and motivational coaches, tactical trainers and small-arms manufacturers, they served a civilian market fascinated with survivalism, paramilitary gear and special operations. An unapologetically muscular and masculine vision of American power was resurgent, and in this world the operator was the apex predator.” - NYT

  • A feckless elite has emasculated the military → made it “woke and weak” 

  • Military has been forced to accommodate gender and racial diversity in the face of the grim necessities of warfare which had always been won by “red-blooded American men”  

    • Patriotism = red-blooded 

    • Anything less than means your patriotism can be called into question 

Moving Away from Tradition at the end of the 20th century

• Industrialism

• Immigration → nearly 12 million immigrants between 1870 and 1900 

• Dominance of Northern white Protestant males increasingly threatened by radical…

  • Unions

  • Strikes 

  • Class conflict

  • Urban slums 

  • Rise of women’s movements 

• End of 19th century → growing sense that the golden age of American expansionism is drawing to a close 

  • Westward Expansion had expended itself 

  • Wars against indigenous people ending 

• Empire is all the rage

  • Teddy wants to be in on that 

  • Rudyard Kipling “The White Man’s Burden” (an advanced copy is sent to Teddy) → Racializing framework for thinking about imperialism; responsibility 

• Future colonies would have to be taken from other imperial powers →  no indigenous people left, basically have to be colonized  

• Spain as one of the weaker colonial powers → Cuba enters the story 

Spanish-American War

• 1890s: Spanish control is weak and American economic interests in Cuba are growing 

  • Many US elite own sugar, tobacco plantations

  • Several famous Cuban nationalists are living in exile in New York 

• 1898: racist depictions of the Spanish as being not fully white, rapacious Catholics = idea that its the Americans job to come in and save the Cubans from Spanish imperialism 

  • Stand with Cuba against empire? Or replace the Spanish?

• McKinley stations USS Maine off Cuba → explosion and 262 people die in 1898 

  • Unleashes war hysteria in US

  • Unsure who did it

  • Leads Teddy Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to call for an invasion

• Roosevelt gives an order to the Asiatic Squadron to assemble in Hong Kong

  • Ordered to seize the Philippines (also colonized by the Spanish)

• Tensions within US regarding Spanish-American War

  • Imperial expansion

Anti-imperialist resistance (in Congress and public opinion)

Teller Amendment

• Declares that the US will not annex Cuba after the war

• Framed intervention as liberation rather than empire

• Doesn’t apply to Puerto Rico or Guam 

Rough Riders

• Roosevelt's hour of glory

  • Resigns as Assistant Secretary of the Navy

  • Joins war in Cuba as volunteer cavalry officer

  • Launch the “Rough Riders” (1st US Volunteer Cavalry)  

  • Self-conscious performance of masculinity and heroism; carefully staged and widely photographed on horseback uniform, armed, leading charge 

Treaty of Paris

• US defeats Spain and acquires

  • Puerto Rico

  • Guam

  • Philippines

• Cuba becomes independent but will face American influence 

• US pays $20m to settle various claims (essentially buys the Philippines) → sparks firenze nationals debate over whether a republic born from a  revolution against colonial rule should become a colonial power itself 

• Andrew Carnegie

  • Founding member of American Anti-Imperialist League 

  • Brings together unlikely coalition of industrial titans, labor leaders and literary figures like Mark Twain

  • Offers to pay $20m for the Philippines to be free 

• Treaty narrowly ratified after much debate

Guantanamo Bay

• Platt Amendment: Legislation that defines the relationship between Cuba and US after the war; includes American right to intervene

• US acquires Guantanamo Bay → known for imprisonment and torture  

• Guantanamo Bay during Bush administration 

  • Post 9/11 → uses many forms of torture and becomes prison for terrorists 

  • Detainees have limited rights 

  • Neither US nor international law applied 

  • 21 years of indefinite detention for 780 Muslim men and boys → only 7 had been conflicted 

  • Inhumane conditions 

  • Are terrible actions morally ok in the context of war? You still end up doing things because of the context you are in

Roman Empire Meme

• People find that their male friends/boyfriend thought about the Roman Empire often in their day to day lives 

• Is this a gendered thing?

• The Roman Empire was unique because it was a unipolar situation → existed in state of hegemony and fell because of internal problems 

• Mark Zuckerberg names his kid Augustus 

• Gladiator films 

Russia vs. Prussia: Empresses

• 1762: coalition of France, Austria and Russia were fighting the Prussian Army led by Frederick the Great, gradually wearing it down

• Fredererick’s defeat appeared imminent 

• Miracle occurs for Frederick → Winter of 1762 he learns that the Russian Czarina Elizabeth had died; she was Prusso-phobic 

  • “The beast is dead” 

  • She doesn’t have her own offspring

  • Her nephew Peter III becomes the emperor  

• Peter III idolized Frederick  = reverses Russia’s war policy and negotiates peace with Prussia 

• Many fear Peter’s concessions to Prussia will lead to a nationwide uprising and threaten the stability of Russia → not a “red-blooded” Russian

• Peter III is overthrown by his wife Catherine the Great → her reign will be marked by major wars and territorial expansion 

• Man sandwiched between two women

• Reversal of gender roles through Prussia-Russia conflict in the 18th century 

  • Miracle for Frederick the Great of Prussia → Prusso-phobic Queen of Russia died and her son, Peter, liked Frederick 

  • Peter reverses Elizabeth's war policy and negotiates peace with Prussia

  • Not very popular with Russians

  • Peter overthrown by his wife Catherine the Great 

    • Territorial expansion

    • Wars of aggression 

Reading: Dara Kay Kohen. 2013. “Explaining Rape During Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009).”

• Lots of missing data on rape

• Puzzle → conflict-level battle death estimates (a combination of soldier and civilian deaths used as a proxy for civilian abuse) are correlated positively, but only weakly, with conflict level rape 

• Theory of combat socialization → important determinant of when you are likely to see sexual violence 

• Alternative arguments that the author discounts

  • Greed and opportunism

    • Material resources and spoils of war

    • Amassing resources = increases power

    • Less accountability to ordinary civilians whom a man may typically depend on 

    • Attracts members who may be more prone to violence 

  • Ethnic hatred 

    • Humiliation of opposing ethnic group 

  • Gender inequality

    • Acceptance of violence for women 

    • Lack of women’s rights vs. abundance of women’s rights

• Case Study: Sierra Leone

  • Two insurgent groups: 

    • Revolutionary United Front (RUF)

      • Kidnapped soldiers  

      • Women were a part of 1 in 5 of the rape incidences 

    • Civilian Defense Forces (CDF)

      • Recruited through social and kinship ties 

• Where are you more likely to see sexual violence: before or after victory?  

• Sexual violence in peacetime vs. wartime

  • Peacetime

    • Individual rape

    • More likely to be previous sexual offender 

  • Wartime 

    • More gang rape

    • More public → performance/spectacle and audience 

    • People who would not normally rape partake 

    • Not easy → context of having support in grimness of war

• This article present just one perspective, there are a lot of other opinions 

  • Ex: Command and control within militant organizations 

    • Tight command and control = less wartime rape 

Iranian Revolution

• 1979: mass uprising to overthrow the Shah of Iran

  • Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile from France

  • Creation of an Islamic Republic 

• Structural causes

1. Shah had a legitimacy problem

• Unpopular

• Installed by the West

• Democratically elected PM overthrown in 1953 coup led by US 

  • Ostensibly to prevent Soviet expansion during Cold War

  • Protect British/American oil interests 

    • Mosaddegh/Maglis nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (1951)

    • Followed the 1953 coup, the oil crisis was averted the AIOC becomes a member of international oil consortium 

  • US and British influence continues 

2. Authoritarian modernization

• Rapid Westernization without political participation → Power in the hands of one man

• Urbanization + inequality + concentration of wealth

• Alienated traditional classes

  • Clergy

  • Urban poor

  • Rural areas 

• Immediate triggers

  • Economic crisis

    • Inflation

    • Unemployment

    • Inequality 

  • Political repression

    • One party rule

    • SAVAK (secret police created by CIA, MI6 etc) 

      • Guardrail against social forces 

        • Clergy

        • Marxists 

        • Student activists 

      • Prisons located in every major city

      • Evin → chief torture facility; nondescript 

    • No legal opposition

Philippine-American War & Torture (Water Cure)

• Resistance to US annexation  

• Rumors concerning atrocities committed by Americans in Philippines

  • George Frisbie Hoar, Republican from MA addresses the senate → “You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

  • War crimes on both sides

  • Retaliation for Filipino guerilla warfare tactics

    • Scorched earth tactics 

      • Retreating armies 

      • Want to increase costs for other side 

    • Forcibly relocates Filipino civilians to concentration camps

    • Thousands die, countless raped

    • 200,000 Filipino civilian deaths → famine and disease   

  • “Water cure” 

    • Used to get information

    • Victim pinioned and forced to swallow large amounts of water and suffer sensations of suffocation 

    • Just before victim passes out → hit in the stomach and the water would gush forth → can offer confession or another longer treatment 

    • Allegedly never received the sanction of official policy in Washington 

    • Said to be work of junior officers and enlisted men

      • Inspired by anger, boredom and racial animosity 

      • Not official policy

      • War makes people do hard things

    • Bush Administration: approves and gives guidelines for how to carry out water boarding 

Milgram’s Agency Theory

• Autonomous state → people direct their own actions and take responsibility for their own actions

• Agentic state → people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders; act as agents for another person’s will  

  • The person giving the orders needs to be perceived as being qualified

  • The person being ordered about should believe that the authority will accept responsibility

Darisu Rejali (2007): Three models to explain torture in democratic republics

1. National security model

• Torture may arise because security bureaucracies overwhelm the elected representative designed to monitor them

• In democracy,  bureaucracies are hierarchical, closed institutions of credentialed experts

• Not enough expertise = turn to torture

• Ex: France in Algerian Civil War

  • Operated outside confines of law 

  • Formed a closed state within a state

  • Military uses its privileged position to establish covert torture 

• Less accountability than elected officials 

• Paradox: Democrats need bureaucrats but bureaucratic rule threatens democracy  

2. Juridical model

• Judicial system privileges confessions 

• Ex: Europe legal revolution in late Middle Ages

  • Church bans ordeal (duels, trials by water or fire) 

  • Replaced with new system of proof in which lawyers had to evaluate evidence and put together a case 

  • Judges and prosecutors prized written documents and above all → confessions to build case against somebody

• Paradoxically: emphasis on confessions → creates incentives to revive practices of torture and new inquisitorial systems 

3. Civic discipline model

• Cases where torture occurs in democracies in absence of a permissive legal context or a national emergency 

• Ex: Athens

  • Tasks of arresting and prosecuting people fell to ordinary citizens

  • State would call a jury

  • Torture was a pre-judicial arrangement → repsonse to accsation against one’s honor and family 

  • “If you don’t believe me, torture my slaves?” → proxy for owners; saw everything that happened and would know if there was guilt 

  • Good civic discipline → if you torture one slave then everybody falls in line 

  • Tied to citizenship → Torture exclusively for noncitizens 

• Ordinary people may take it upon themselves to enforce law and order 

• Not everyone will be at the receiving end of torture 

Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Names? Why use the bomb? How it was used?

• 1999 survey: atomic bombs come in first as top 100 newsworthy stories 

• Superfortress bomber (B-29)

  • Aircraft used to drop atomic bomb

  • Used in WWII and Korean War 

  • Also used for raids and overhead bombing

  • Most expensive weapons system of WWII (more than Manhattan Project)

  • Enola Gay → named after Enola Gay Tibbets, mother of pilot, Colonel Pail Tibbets who would drop the atomic bomb

• Little Boy = Name of the bomb itself

• Paul Tibbets: “My thoughts turned at this point to my courageous red-haired mother whose confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood…”

• The Mission

  • Six planes

    • Enola Gay = First to carry bomb 

    • The Great Artiste = Second to take scientific measurements of the blast 

    • Necessary Evil = Third to take photos 

    • Others flew ahead to act as weather scouts 

• Devastation 

  • 70,000-80,000 people killed instantly 

  • Many more succumbed to injuries

  • 90% civilian casualties 

• Debated: Why use the atomic bomb? 

  • Traditionalist: force Japan’s surrender

  • Revisionist: signal to the USSR

  • Middle ground: both

• Josh Byun and Austin Carson: The real question isn't why was the bomb used, the question is how was the bomb used? 

  • What was the way in which it was used

  • US intentionally orchestrated an ultra-lethal, highly visible debut of atomic power

  • Doing so allows the US to…

    • Reshape global perceptions of relative power

    • Secure influence in the postwar order 

  • American leaders anticipated Soviet conventional superiority

  • Logic of Spectacular Violence

    • Bomb = equalizer

    • Unmistakable, unambiguously and publicly legible to global audience 

    • Connects back to Dara Kay Cohen: gang rape is notable for its performance aspects  

  • Truman administration rejects other options → hurt the objectives of clarity, shock and credibility of the signal 

    • Noncombatant i.e. harmless demonstrations

    • Advance warnings 2-3 days in advance → protracted leaflet campaign added to the surprise and lethality of the atomic bombings 

    • Purely military targets 

  • Target Committee has criteria to enhance the “performance” 

    • Intact urban landscape → visible contrast

    • Population + industrial density → visible damage

    • Terrain that amplified blast effects → create spectacle 

  • Hiroshima = ideal stage space

    • Saving Hiroshima for atomic bomb

    • Others cities already been laid waste 

  • Paradox: public opinion constraints as American leaders feared…

    • Moral revulsion

    • Loss postwar legitimacy 

    • Can’t be seen outdoing Hitler 

    • To avoid this they…

      • Kyoto has too much cultural symbolism 

      • Suppressed information about radiation 

• Bombing of Nagasaki

  • Logic of bombings in quick succession → convince… 

  • Primary target was Kokura, but poor visibility due to cloud cover and smoke from a nearby firebombing raid forces the bomber to pivot to the secondary target 

  • Nagasaki had not been placed off limits to bombers and had been bombed at least five times prior

  • Almost everything would go wrong (opposite of Hiroshima)

  • Roughly 75,000 deaths

  • Roughly two miles off city center

Surveys

• Data collection device

• Used in about a quarter of all articles and about half of all quantitative articles published in major political science journals

• Different interpretations of the same questions 

  • “How much say do you have in government” → what counts as “a lot of say” may vary across respondents 

  • WHO surveys:

    • High number of Mexicans who said they had no say in government (soon after PRI was removed, opposition in power = optimism about democracy) 

    • Lower number of Chinese 

• To reduce problems of incomparability 

  • Writer clearer questions

  • Add concrete response labels

Use scales (strongly agree → strongly disagree)

King et al (2024: Surveys

• Measure incomparability of hypothetical individuals and use this to correct for self-assessments 

• Ask respondents two kinds of questions

  • Self-assessment: “How much say do you have in government?”

  • Vignette assessments: “How much say does this hypothetical person have?” (see examples on slides) 

    • See how the vignettes are ordered by respondent

    • Helpful to compare respondents by rescaling 

    • Can then stretch one respondent's scale so that the vignette assessment of the two respondents match (see slides for picture) 

    • Can also adjust by recoding (1 in minimum say in government and 7 is maximum) 

    • Have interpretable units 

Reading: Fahd Humayun. 2026. “Sport, Nation & Contagion: Attitudes to Cross-border Conflict in South Asia.”

• Human beings care about loss more than gains → more likely to change attitudes 

• Choosing provinces where politics are central

• Historical rivalry 

• Untested water: connection between sports and interstate conflict 

• Should India and Pakistan play each other?  

• After successive loss for Pakistan: national confidence mechanism

  • increased ethnonationalism

  • reduced risk acceptance for military adventurism because of dented national confidence

• After successive wins for India: retributive justice mechanism

  • reduced national identification

  • slightly reduces retirbutive sentiment

• Pivot to October 7th → connection to the results

  • dampened support for cross-border conflict

Nationalism: Positives and Negatives

• enerally defined as identification with a nation-state and viewing other nations as fundamentally different 

  • IR scholars have long viewed nationalism as a cause of international conflicts 

  • Assumption → there are negative consequences that make war more likely 

• Positive in-group effect

  • National collectivity; can help unite people

  • Makes ethnic cleavages less salient and halt protests 

  • Iraq: playing on same soccer team as Muslim refugees had positive effects on Christian refugee players attitudes and behavior towards Muslims  

  • Exposure to Mohamed Salah on Liverpool soccer team 

    • Using data on hate crime reports and 15 million tweets from British soccer fans 

    • After Salah joined Liverpool FC

      • Hate crimes in Liverpool area dropped by 16% 

      • Halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-fight clubs

    • Contact hypothesis → interpersonal… 

• Negative effects: Sporting nationalism can also give rise to exclusivism and violence 

  • Identity of ingroup becomes more and more exclusive 

  • Match days and violent crime

    • Quantifies how much of violent crime in Germany can be attributed to professional football games 

    • Violent crime increases by 17% on a match day 

    • Attributed to violence among males in the 18-39 age group 

    • Violent crime rises to 63% on days with high-rivalry matches 

  • US NFL Sundays

    • Domestic violence incidents rise by about 10% on days when NFL games are played

    • Usually occurring in family homes 

  • Results from loss

    • Upset losses

      • When home team had been predicted to win → 10% increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against wives and girlfriends 

      • Concentrated in narrow time window near the end of the game 

    • Losses when the game was expected to be close has small and insignificant effects 

    • Upset wins also have little impact on violence 

Measurement problem for nationalism

• Not easy to prove whether fluctuations in nationalism actually cause conflict

1. Measurement problem 

• No dataset exists that tracks nationalism across the international system in a comprehensive way

2. Endogeneity problem

• Difficult to determine which variable is actually causing the other

• Surges of nationalism occur when tensions between countries are already high

• Makes it difficult to tell whether nationalism causes conflict or just accompanies it 

Exogenous shock: sports occur separate from politics

World Cup Aggression (Bertoli, ISQ 2017)

• Leverage natural experiment

• Compare countries between 1958 and 2010 that barely qualified for the World Cup with countries that barely missed qualifications 

  • Very similar

  • Separated by small differences in points 

  • Only difference is if they got the nationalistic shock by going to the World Cup → so were there increase in aggression 

• Qualification/participation is almost random → similar to randomized experiment and offer a clear test of whether qualification affects interstate aggression 

• Selects pairs of countries that were separated by no more than two points in the standings 

• Outcomes

  • Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) → captures state aggression and codes highest level of action taken by each country 

    • Threats of roce

    • Military displays

    • Attacks

    • Wars 

  • Going to the World Cup increases state aggression substantially 

    • Increases aggression by about ⅖ as much as revolution does

    • Resembles the effect of electing a leader with military experience

  • Qualifiers more likely to take military action + actions they take tend to be more violent 

  •  Results are driven entirely by countries where soccer is the most popular sport

    • African countries

    • Latin American countries

    • European countries

    • Little effect in countries where soccer is less central 

The Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference

• Encapsulates the identification problems we face as causal inferences are based on comparisons of counterfactual quantities that can’t be observed

• Unable to see counterfactual → we only see things that do happen 

• Ex: X—>Y: Assassination → War 

  • Did the assassination of Franz Ferdinand cause WWI?

    • Treatment (Z) = assassination  

    • Outcome (Y) = occurrence of WWI 

World	Assassination	WWI
Real world	Yes	Yes
Counterfactual	No	?

• The counterfactual is unobservable 

• For each unit i → iterations 

  • Yi (1) = outcome if treated = assassination happens 

  • Yi (0) = outcome if untreated = assassination does not happen

• Causal effect of assassination = difference =  Yi (1) - Yi (0)

• The potential outcomes framework

i

Zi = 0

Zi = 1

Yi = 0

Yi = 1

• See slides

• This is where experiments are helpful

  • Random assignment 

  • Treated and control groups are comparable

  • Control group approximates counterfactual 

  • Average treatment effect (ATE) ≈ the average outcome treated - average outcome control 

• Ex: Bertoli and the World Cup

  • Treatment = going to the World Cup 

  • Yi (1) = outcome if treated = state behavior after your country barely qualified for the World Cup 

  • Yi (0) = outcome if untreated = state behavior after your country barely missed qualification

  • Every world has only two potential outcomes → can’t receive both treatments 

    • The individual level causal effect of going to the World Cup is the difference between the effect  of going to the World Cup is the difference between the effect of Switzerland having qualified in 1994, and the effect had it not qualified in 1994

    • Effect of the treatment for just one person or country, and its only measurable with  time machine or some way to observe parallel universe 

    • Still not effective with just one pair 

  • But if we compared all countries and measured their individual level of casual effects →  difference between those that receive treatment and those that don’t = Average Treatment Effect = effect of treatment across entire population  

    • That's why he compares the two states, one present a counterfactual and the other receives the treatment → comparable  

    • Created a universe of potential outcomes 

    • Able to have a sample of cases that receive the treatment and a sample of cases that don’t 

Estimand/Target

• the true causal effect we want to know after an intervention in a target population 

  • Quantity of interest

  • Operates at population level

  • The theoretical thing we want to know

Estimator

• Procedure or rule for estimating the given quantity of interest, based on observed data

• ATE = E [Yi (Z=1) - Yi 0 (Z=0)] 

  • Difference in means estimator

  • Uses Yi to estimate the ATE

• The rule or formula uses to calculate the ATE from the data 

Estimate

• Estimate /Result → the actual calculated number we get from data 

US-Japan Relations in WW2: Public Opinion and Surrender

• Public opinion constraints (in regards to Hiroshima) as American leaders feared…

  • Moral revulsion

  • Loss postwar legitimacy 

  • Can’t be seen outdoing Hitler 

  • To avoid this they…

    • Kyoto has too much cultural symbolism 

    • Suppressed information about radiation 

• August 1945: 85% of the US public approve of the decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • 44% of the public said that the US should have dropped the bombs “one city at a time”

  • 26% said that it should have dropped the bomb “where there were no] people 

  • 23% said the US should have “wiped out [all Japanese] cities” 

  • 4% said they would have “refused to use” the bomb

• US public approval of the decision to use nuclear weapons has declined significantly → 2015 poll finds only 46% of Americans view the bombing as “the right thing to do”

• Emperor’s Surrender

  • Potsdam Conference: Truman insisted on the unconditional surrender of Japan 

    • Truman’s secretary of war felt that the status of Emperor Hirohito has cultural significant 

    • Emperor would not be put on trial or punished → needed for Japanese surrender 

  • After Hiroshima/Nagasaki → Japan signals willingness to surrender if the emperor's authority was preserved 

  • US Response: Byrnes Letter

    • The emperor would remain but be subordinate to Allied occupation authority

    • Japan could determine its future government 

  • Truman did not discuss the Byrnes letter in his public address announcing the end of the war → insists the surrender had full acceptance of Potsdam Declaration  

    • Truman understood the public view of Hirohito’s culpability (evidence in public polls of Americans)

      • 11% want him in prison for life

      • 33% want him executed  

  • What would have happened if the US had softened its unconditional surrender terms earlier? Prolonged the war?

Stated vs. revealed preferences

• People don’t always tell the truth on surveys (conscious or unconscious) 

  • Stated preferences = what people say they believe

Revealed preferences = what people’s actual actions and behaviors say about their preferences

Gender gap in attitudes about war and the use of force

• Since 70s: gender has been one of the more important predictors of these attitudes

• Women being consistently less likely than men to support the use of force 

• Applies to many contexts 

• See slides for polls 

• After Pearl Harbour Jeanette Rankin = first woman elected to House of representation

  • Only dissenter in going to war against Japan 

  • The last member of Congress to vote against a declaration of war (haven’t declared war since) 

  • “As a woman, I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else” 

• Caprioli

  • States having twice the number of years of female suffrage will be nearly 5 times as likely to resolve international disputes without military violence

  • States with lower percentage of women in parliament are more likely to use military violence to settle disputes

  • 5% decrease in proposition of women in parliament = state nearly 5 times as likely to use military violence to resolve dispute

Optional Reading: Michael Hansen, Jennifer Clemens and Kathleen Dolan. 2022. “Gender Gaps, Partisan Gaps, and Cross-Pressures: An Examination of American Attitudes toward the Use of Force.”

1. Women are generally more dovish than men

• True within both parties 

2. Gender gap differs by party

• Difference between men and women is larger among Democrats than among Republicans

  • Democratic men vs. Democratic women → bigger gap

  • Republican men vs. Republican women → smaller gap 

• Cross pressures → some groups are influenced by two competing identities 

  • Republican women

    • Gender pushes them dovish

    • Party pushes them hawkish

  • Democratic men 

    • Gender pushes them hawkish

    • Party pushes them dovish 

3. Party identity matters a lot

• See slides 

• Women

  • Lower tolerance for battle casualties

  • More skeptical about deploying combat troops

  • Less supportive of military escalation 

• Gender gaps are largest when

  • Ground troops are being considered

  • The goal is forcing political change in another country  

  • Exceptions: women become more supportive when..

    • Peacekeeping missions

    • Humanitarian military operations

Reading: Tiffany Barnes & Diana O Brien. 2018. “Defending the Realm: The Appointment of Female Defense Ministers Worldwide.”

• Changing role of women in politics after the Cold War

• Does the defense minister mean the same thing across all regimes? 

• Exclusion of women from the role as defense minister 

  • International military conflict

  • Military dictatorships 

  • Larger military expenditures 

• Initial appointment of a female defense minister can be explained by 

  • The changing nature both of women’s role in politics

    • more female parliamentarians

    • female chief executives (self-appointment)

  • By changing nature of the defense ministry role itself 

    • left-wing governments of former military states want to move away and redefine

    • peacekeeping ambitions

Gendered Portfolios+ Parliamentarians in Pakistan

• High prestige posts

  • Defense

  • Foreign affairs

  • Interior

  • Finance 

  • Agriculture → context dependent; dovetails with the economy; lifeline

• Low prestige posts 

  • Health

  • Education

  • Development

  • Poverty

• Humayun (2024): Parliamentarians in Pakistan 

  • Asks parliamentarians to rank order top 3 committees they would like to be appointed to 

  • Results

    • Foreign affairs and defense were the foremost preferences (for both men and women)

      • Important for Pakistan

      • Also a high visibility policy arena 

    • Men and women pretty similar

    • Men more likely to list ministry of information as a preference area 

      • Highly visible

      • Questions from the press 

    • Women didn’t choose narcotics or petroleum at all

      • Lucrative; money involved

Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish: Who gets into more wars, kings or queens? (Instrumental Validity Strategy)

• Comparing queen and non-queen politics 

• Study how often European rulers went to war between 1480-1913

• Looking at polities that had at least one female ruler during that time 

  • Note: territorial boundaries do not match present-day

• Methodological problem → you cannot just compare queens’ reigns vs. kings reigns 

  • Contexts differ

  • Women come to power in unusual situations (like succession crises) → correlate with likelihood of war  

  • Queens are not randomly selected

  • Need to separate out the effect of a queen’s reign from the effect of the situation that led to the queen’s reign 

• Instrumental Variable Strategy

  • Instead of comparing all queens reigns vs. all kings reigns

  • Exploit random hereditary succession by looking at two variables from the previous rulers family

    • Was the first child a boy? Firstborn son → more likely next ruler is a king

    • Did the previous ruler have a sister? → Increases the change a woman inherits the throne

  • Find factors that

    • Affect whether the ruler becomes a queen

    • But do not directly affect war 

• Polity-year dataset of 193 reigns in 18 polities, with queens ruling 18% of these

  • They include polity-fixed effects for each state

    • Countries are different in permanent ways

    • Compare France under a king vs. France under a queen (not comparing across countries) 

• Queens often allowed to rule in more stable periods → which made them look more peaceful than they actually were 

  • See slides 

• Polities ruled by queens were 39% more likely to wage war in a given year than those ruled by kings  

  • Conditional on a key attribute → marital status

  • Unmarried queens = more likely to be attacked by others because they are perceived as politically vulnerable

  • Married queens = more likely to be the ones initiating wars

    • Delegate military and fiscal authority to husbands → which kings were less inclined to do with their female spouses 

      • Taboo for women to command armies 

      • Marriage contracts even specified this arrangement 

    • Why this mattered

      • Army sizes growing and becoming permanent

      • Wars more frequent and more expensive 

      • Need more military management = greater state capacity 

  • Idea of fitness → ability to pass on genes 

  • Marriage effectively allowed for an extra high-capacity royal household

Kamala Harris’ Electability and Heteronormativity

• Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference → we don’t see the counterfactual 

  • Think of a counterfactual statement that would substantiate the positions below 

• Harris lost because…

  • The patriarchy

    • Man with same political background, like Gavin Newsom 

    • Black woman

  • Poor candidacy 

    • Biden drops out early on: More unity

    • Clearer campaign points and targets 

    • Focus on abortion and women’s rights 

• The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose: Pete Buttigieg 

  • Picking a gay man would have been too risky 

  • Targeting more moderate male population 

  • Identity defines ideology 

  • 2018-2022: 60% rise in LBGTQ candidates 

• Candidates from underrepresented groups often differ from dominant group candidates in their qualifications  → Women and gay candidates tend to be more qualified and better funded 

• Biases that hurt candidates

  • Bias against sexual orientation

  • Bias against gender nonconformity (penalty for individuals whose external appearance diverges from societal expectations associated with their ascribed gender identity) 

  • Lynchpins of heteronormativity 

    • The social order that ranks heterosexuality as the natural and normative form of attraction 

  • Which is more costly when running for office?

Candidate Heteronormativity (Nuanov)

• Survey experiments

  • Head shot and audio message of candidates

  • Respondents who identify or lean REP review REP candidates

  • Respondents who identify or lean DEM review DEM candidates

  • Sexuality = 2 conditions

    • Gay

    • Straight 

  • Gender presentation = 3 conditions

    • Baseline hypothetical male candidate

    • Slightly more feminized

    • More feminized version (gender nonconforming) 

  • Use Psychomorph (face database software) to create subtle changes between headshots → facial features impact perceived gender conformity 

  • Also adjust acoustics of audio messages 

  • Small changes Baseline candidate 3.22 feminity scale, 4,02 for slightly gender nonforming and further to 4.58 for more feminized 

• Similar reductions in support

  • Identifying as gay results in lower feeling thermometer ratings a reduction in support from 69% to 62%

  • Gender nonconforming appearance in men reduced the odds of receiving support from 68% to 61% 

• Gay candidates 

  • Republican voters penalized gay candidates at consistently higher rates (support drops 22%)

  • Democrats slightly prefer gay candidates (support increases by 6%)  

• Both Democrats and Republicans penalize gender nonconformity 

Reading: Iris Marion Young. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.”

• Idea of “Homeland Security”

• Protection racket 

  • Ex: Red Scare 

  • If we try to decline protection and seek freedom → become suspect and are threatened by the organization that claims to protect us 

• Logic of a male protector and masculinist protection 

  • Democracies privatize, exploit and incite fear 

  • Elevate protector to position of authority

  • Demote the rest of us to position of grateful dependency 

  • Implicit deal: forgo freedom, due process and the right to hold leaders accountable, and in return we will make sure that you are safe  

• State coded as masculine in its relation to the civilians 

• State is often referred to with feminine pronouns

  • Ex: Motherland  

• Feminists as complicit and aiding in this perception 

  • Western women infantilized other women

  • Women in other countries as subordinate

  • Ex: women of Afghanistan 

    • Enduring Freedom mission 

    • Begins as self-defense but discourse becomes about Afghan women 

  • Colonialist ideology 

• What compulsions on female leaders as a result of this idea of protection?

  • Would they be less willing to take on leadership during times of intense domestic fear? 

  • Display more masculine features? 

• Is this a different kind of protection that doesn’t necessarily require you to be empathetic? 

Research of Anxiety

• Manipulation of anxiety of this emotion figures so prominently in politics 

  • Instrumentalized for political agendas

  • Strong, documented effects on the judgment and choices of voters 

• Research on anxiety suffers from a methodological problem → the emotions in question are generated by political information or events 

  • Makes isolating effects of emotions in studies difficult 

  • Political information (stimulus) is likely to affect political attitudes in a variety of pathways besides through emotion 

• Research points to a division between emotions that are… 

  • Integral to the decision process and emotions 

    • Ex: selling stock because CEO’s reckless spending makes you angry

    • Most research on emotions and politics focus on integral emotions 

      • Predicted emotional reactions to certain event

      • Actual emotional reactions experienced during a decision process 

  • Incidental, or unrelated, to the decision at hand 

    • Ex: selling stocks because a driver cut you off on your morning commute 

    • Incidental emotions often carry over to unrelated domains and affects the judgements and decision making of individuals in critical and often unappreciated ways 

Renshon, Lee and Tingley (2015): how anxiety influences political attitudes about immigration 

• Trigger anxiety using a video stimulus unrelated to politics 

• Focus on political beliefs about immigration 

• Measure changes in the electrical conductance of the skin caused by increased sweat gland activity → proxy for how anxious you are 

• Bypassing more common self-reported levels of emotion

• Hypothesis → anxiety should intervene in the appraisal process, triggering prejudice toward outgroup members 

  • Predicted physiological reactivity should mediate the relationship between induced anxiety and attitudes toward immigrants 

• Procedure

  • Each subject sits at computer and given a story to read about immigration 

  • Watch video featuring relaxing palm tree video → measure baseline anxiety

  • Subjects assigned 1 of 3 videos

    • Relax condition: crystal chakra meditation 

    • Neutral condition: screen-saver of abstract shapes 

    • Anxiety condition: watch clip from the film Cliffhanger → attempting to save a woman dangling from a cliff

• Look at skin conductance when…

  • Asked how anxious or proud they are about immigration

  • Questions about their support for immigration  

• Advantages of using incidental emotions

  • Ex: if they had asked participants to think about terrorist attack like 9/11 → anxiety that would be triggered would be related to political beliefs and perceptions about out-groups 

• Results

  • In line with theoretical expectations

  • Skin conductance 

    • Relaxed video = less anxious 

    • Neutral video = slightly anxious

    • Anxiety video = more anxious 

  • Heightened physiological reactivity mediated the relationship between anxiety and anti-immigration attitudes

More hostile to immigrants because they are more anxious   

Women and Wartime Atmospheres post-9/11

• After 9/11 → level of willingness to support a qualified woman presidential candidate were lower 

  • Issue prioritization

    • 30-50% stated that issues associated with war on terrorism occupied forefront of their own political agendas 

    • End of Cold War - 9/11 = fewer than 10% named defense or foreign policy as most important problem 

• Lawless (2004): Investigates if the atmosphere of war might affect women candidate electoral prospect 

  • Survey in 2002

  • Nationally representative sample of America

  • Finds that citizens

    • Prefer men’s leadership traits and characteristics

      • Respondents slotted “masculine” traits in 3 of top 4 positions as most important in political candidates 

    • Deemed men to be more competent at issues of national security and military

      • Almost ⅔ of respondents do not believe that men and women office-holders are equally suited to deal with military affairs 

      • Think women would be good at addressing the deficit 

    • Men as superior to women at addressing new obstacles generated by 9/11 

Haider-Markel ad Viewx (2008): who supported torture in the war on terror?

• Respondents randomly assigned 4 different scenarios which vary

  • Probability that detainee had information

    • Modest chance

    • Strong chance 

  • Importance of the information 

    • Information about a terrorist group

    • Information that could prevent a terrorist attack 

• Outcome variable: support for interrogation technique

• Results

  • Gender Gap

    • Women less supportive of harsh interrogation techniques

      • Punching or kicking

      • Waterboarding

      • Sexual humiliation

      • Threatening detainee family

    • Women have greater opposition to torture  

    • Women increased support with contexts about saving lives 

    • Women as a whole remained strongly opposed to the most extreme techniques → applies in all but two cases

      • Withholding food and water

      • Forcing detainee to sit in stressful position 

  • Partisanship

    • Strongest predictor of who support torture

    • Republicans more supportive of harsh techniques

    • Democrats less supportive of harsh techniques 

    • Republican women are more supportive of torture than Democratic women 

  • Context framing…