Identity Fusion and the Use of Force: A Group-Psychological Explanation for Support of Military Interventions

• Author: James S. Krueger,Marissa Theys,Francisco I. Pedraza
• Date: 01 June 2020
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919831786
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919831786

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(2) 381 –395

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919831786

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Article

Under what circumstances will the public support mili-

tary intervention in other countries? The responses to this

question are many and varied, with prior work examining

the type of intervention, casualties, the role of elites, and

ideology. More recently, scholars have focused on the

importance of identity and attachment to one’s nation to

explain variation in public support (Herrmann 2017;

Herrmann, Isernia, and Segatti 2009). These perspectives

suggest multiple approaches to disaggregating public

opinion, although the results of disaggregation have not

always been consistent (Krueger and Pedraza 2018;

Mader 2015; Reifler et al. 2014).

Here, we attempt to clarify some of these findings by

disaggregating the public by their degree of psychologi-

cal attachment to military veterans and the type of inter-

vention proposed, to enhance existing explanations of

why some individuals are more aggressive in their sup-

port of certain types of military intervention.

We begin from existing literature on proximity to the

military, which analyzes individual-level factors, includ-

ing geographic location or relational proximity to a vet-

eran (Gartner 2008; Krueger and Pedraza 2015) to

understand attitudes toward both hypothetical and actual

military interventions. We ask why it is that some seg-

ments of the public may appear more aggressive, or are

more willing to support military action even when there is

perceived risk, than others. The means by which some

members of the public choose among forms of interven-

tion to support and which to oppose lay at the heart of this

question. Some scholars emphasize the importance of

nationalism to explain this variation (Herrmann, Isernia,

and Segatti 2009; Kinder and Kam 2010). As a comple-

ment to this identity-attachment perspective, we suggest

that attachment to the group most visible in intervention,

military veterans, is also a useful lens for understanding

variation in support for military interventions.

Attachment to military veterans has been measured in

several ways, including having a relative who served

(Gartner 2008), local veteran population density (Krueger

and Pedraza 2015), and local casualties (Althaus,

Bramlett, and Gimpel 2012). Implicit in these measures is

a conflation of multiple forms of attachment: the social

attachment created by the increased density of military

veteran population within a community and the proxim-

ity of respondents to those veterans, and the psychologi-

cal attachment of individuals who emphasize the interests

of military veterans in the calculations. By eschewing a

831786PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919831786Political Research QuarterlyTheys et al.

research-article2019

1University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA

2University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, USA

3University of California, Riverside, USA

Corresponding Author:

Marissa Theys, 3116 Emerson Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55408, USA.

Email: Marissa.theys@gmail.com

Identity Fusion and the Use of Force:

A Group-Psychological Explanation for

Support of Military Interventions

Marissa Theys1, James S. Krueger2 and Francisco I. Pedraza3

Abstract

Under what circumstances will the public support military intervention in other countries? Recent answers have

focused on the importance of identity and attachment to one’s nation to explain variation in public support. We posit

that some segments of the public are more willing than others to support military action even when there is perceived

risk due to a psychological attachment to veterans. We distinguish kinship, geographic, and psychological forms of

propinquity and argue that the psychological attachment of an individual to a group drives disparate attitudes about

military force when their group is threatened. Using a unique national data set, we examine public attitudes across a

range of hypothetical and actual military interventions and find that psychological attachment, measured using identity

fusion, helps to explain the pattern of support across interventions. We conclude with a discussion of the implications

of our findings on the use of force literature.

Keywords

identity fusion, military intervention, public opinion