U.S. Public Approval of Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia and Bosnia: The Role of Partisan Identification With the President

Abstract

The factors that influence American public approval for military humanitarian interventions are wide-ranging, with studies showing the importance of domestic and international effects. A gap in the current body of literature is the potential influence of the president’s partisan identification on public approval. This thesis investigates this connection using the cases of U.S. military humanitarian interventions in Somalia and Bosnia. The hypothesis of this work is that partisan identification with the president was an important factor in approval for the military humanitarian interventions in Somalia under George H.W. Bush and Bosnia under Bill Clinton. Informal comparisons between multiple polls from each intervention and measures of bivariate association found evidence of a positive relationship between partisan identification with the president and approval for the intervention. Multivariate logistic regressions provided mixed results. Other potentially important explanatory factors controlled for in the analysis include attitudes to domestic and foreign policies, age, sex, and education. Partisan identification with the president was not a statistically significant factor in approval in Somalia under Bush but was in Bosnia under Clinton. The divergent results lead to the conclusion that partisan identification with the president can be influential the formation of public opinion, but a different combination of demographic and attitudinal factors drove approval for each intervention.