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I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Help: Public Perceptions of Coercive State Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2024
Abstract
Under what conditions does the US public support the domestic use of different institutions of coercive state power? We theorize how the type of situation, the type of actor, the mission, and the type of intervention influence public support for such missions. We use a preregistered conjoint survey experiment to test our hypotheses and find that participants (i) are less supportive of interventions in response to protests than to natural disasters or terrorism, (ii) generally prefer the police or the National Guard to the military, (iii) mistrust order maintenance interventions, and (iv) prefer intervening actors be unarmed. Preferences (ii)–(iv) are strongly conditioned on the type of event. We also find that Republicans are more accepting of military actors, order maintenance interventions, armed interventions, and policing responses to protests. We note implications for public trust in the military, the militarization of policing, and the domestic use of federal forces.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association
References
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Blankshain et al. supplementary material
Blankshain et al. supplementary material
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