SSP Wednesday Seminar with speaker Jim Golby, University of Texas at Austin.

Why is the confidence of the American public in its military so high?  What does it matter for policymaking and politics? Most of what we already know about this topic comes either from standard surveys designed with other purposes in mind or from older studies conducted in the pre-9/11 era. Along with my co-author, Peter Feaver (Duke), I have collected new data from two large surveys of the American public using instruments designed to probe the determinants and consequents of public confidence in the military.