Abstract
When do Americans support the government’s use of torture? We argue that perceptions of threat undermine the extent to which American public opinion serves as a bulwark against government torture. Although surveys demonstrate that a slim majority of the American public generally opposes torture, using a nationally-representative survey experiment, we show that Americans are considerably more supportive of government abuse when it is directed at individuals who they perceive as threatening: specifically, when a detainee has an Arabic name and when the alleged crime is terrorism. Given the malleability of public opinion as a potential constraint on abuse, our results underscore the importance of institutional protections of human rights.
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For public opinion to influence government policy, leaders also must acquiesce to the will of the people. We address this requirement in additional detail below.
Torture is illegal under domestic and international law in the United States. The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution [e.g., Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878)] and the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act prohibit the United States government from engaging in torture. The U.S. has further condemned torture by signing and ratifying the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1966 International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, and the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).
In May 2014, Amnesty International published results from public opinion surveys in twenty-one countries showing that support for government abuse of people detained for threats to public safety varies from a low of 12% (Greece) to as high as 74% (China and India), with 36% of respondents worldwide supporting the use of abusive tactics (Amnesty International 2014). Citizens in authoritarian regimes may view human rights violations like torture differently than citizens in democracies (Blakeley 2007). In this article, we focus solely on public opinion in the United States.
These levels of support are a radical departure from the past. During World War II, support for torture among Americans was in the single digits, except when the hypothetical detainee was Adolf Hitler, in which case it rose to 20%. Between World War II and 9/11, surveys asking Americans about support of U.S. government torture do not exist (Miller et al. 2014, pp. 18–21).
While dismissing the notion that these techniques are “torture,” former Vice President Richard Cheney has repeatedly defended the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” since leaving office. “I would do it again in a minute”...“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation” (Shane 2014). The Vice President’s position was representative of many in the Bush Administration, although some argued against the legal standing of enhanced interrogation techniques. See Goldsmith (2007) for an insider’s account of the debate about torture within the Bush Administration.
For example, Hendrix and Wong (2013, p. 58) argue, “Colombians voted for Uribe precisely because they knew he would be willing to violate international human rights standards in pursuit of ending the civil war.”
For public opinion to serve as an actual constraint against torture in democracies, governments (i.e., executive agents) must be responsive to public policy demands. Relative to other policies, the executive has a great deal of control over decisions to engage in—or limit—the use of torture. Public opinion, even when amounting to a clear consensus, is only operative if it is reflected in the actions of executive behavior regarding torture. Additionally, in cases where opinion is divided, government leaders may not consider the voices of all citizens equally. Indeed, recent work by Bartels (2009) and Gilens and Page (2014, p. 565) argues that public policy decisions in the U.S. call the responsiveness of governmental actors into question and suggest a bias in political influence, noting that “mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence” on government policy.
One could argue that by supporting torture under conditions of threat, some individuals may hope to “protect the lives” of the community at large. In our view, such a claim simply illustrates the fickle (situational) nature of public support for human rights. Under perceptions of threat, citizens are willing to allow their government to violate one of the fundamental tenets of human rights and international law—the prohibition against torture.
Many scholars argue that the influence of threat on political tolerance is conditional on individual-level characteristics including predispositions (i.e., personality) and political attitudes (Marcus 1995), ethnocentrism (Kam et al. 2007), authoritarianism (Hetherington and Suhay 2011), and political party affiliation (Malhotra and Popp 2012). Because our goal is to determine the effect of context on support for government torture, we employ an experimental design that effectively controls (via random assignment) for individual-level covariates.
These results echo those of Davis (2007), who finds that respondents of the 2001 National Civil Liberties Survey were less supportive of protecting the rights of non-citizens and foreigners than other individuals.
Our approach differs from that of Huddy et al. (2005) in several ways. Conceptually, we are interested in a broader conceptualization of “threat” than terrorism. Our conceptualization and operationalization of threat are discussed in additional detail in the next section of the paper. Empirically, we employ an experimental research design rather than simple observational analysis; random assignment of the treatments in our experiments allow us to investigate the effect of several types of threat on support for torture, independent of individual respondent characteristics.
In contrast, Miller, Gronke and Rejali (2014, pp. 27–33) argue that when forming opinions about complex topics, Americans take their cues from political elites rather than their consumption of fiction.
See also McCoy (2006).
Gould and Klor (2010) use a similar method to show that the threat of terrorism makes Israelis more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Beyond a certain threshold, however, the threat of terrorism makes Israelis less likely to grant concessions to the Palestinians.
Unlike the majority of the extant literature on public opinion and government torture, our approach is experimental in nature and consequently yields higher levels of internal validity.
Further details regarding the CCES sample design can be found at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/book/sample-design. The response rate for the 2012 CCES was 44%. The data and codebook can be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/21447.
In what follows, we present a 3 \(\times\) 2 experimental design. Our original CCES survey experiment employed a 4 \(\times\) 2 design. In addition to the the three Male conditions described below, we also included in our original survey a White Female condition. Respondents were thus randomly assigned to one of eight conditions: (1) Arab Male Allegedly Criminal, (2) Arab Male Allegedly Terrorist, (3) Latino Male Allegedly Criminal, (4) Latino Male Allegedly Terrorist, (5) White Male Allegedly Criminal, (6) White Male Allegedly Terrorist, (7) White Female Allegedly Criminal, (8) White Female Allegedly Terrorist. Rather than present the results of the original 4 \(\times\) 2 design below, we present results for a 3 \(\times\) 2 design because respondents who received the Female treatment were no more or less likely to support abusive treatment than those in the White Male treatments, we drop respondents who received the Female treatment from the analyses reported below to focus on the role of race/ethnicity and situational threat.
Davenport et al. (2011) similarly argue that because protest events with African-American participants are deemed more “threatening,” such events will be met with increased police presence and violence.
Elected politicians recognize that labeling a dissident (group) as a “terrorist(s)” delegitimizes the dissident (group) (Truman 2003). As such, Tilly (2004) argues that the terms, “terror, terrorism, and terrorist do not identify causally coherent and distinct social phenomena but strategies that recur across a wide variety of actors and political situations.”
An additional implication of our argument suggests—perhaps counterintuitively—that democratic countries should be more likely to increase their use of torture in response to terror tactics than non-democratic ones. Conrad et al. (2016) show that while the amount of torture countries are accused of committing is not correlated with the number of terror attacks that occur in the country, the amount of torture that military personnel are accused of committing is positively associated with the number of transnational terror attacks that occur in that country. Further, the relationship is stronger in democracies than in autocratic countries.
We chose to present a “crime” scenario that insinuates the detainee is undocumented. We assume that respondents see lack of documentation as a crime. To the extent that this assumption does not hold, we are less likely to find support for our main hypotheses.
The reader may be concerned that the reference to the Oklahoma City bombing, an incident from over two decades ago, may produce a heterogeneous treatment effect, where older or better educated respondents pick up on the terror cue, but younger or less educated respondents, who are less familiar with the event, do not. We do not find heterogeneous treatment effects in our analysis of the Terror versus Non-Terror conditions that follow. See Model 4 in Table B3 of our Online Appendix for details.
Although we speak about increased levels of support for torture, it is proper to note that only values greater than 4 indicate agreement with torture.
Please see our Online Appendix for a number of alternative model specifications that demonstrate the robustness of our results. All of those results support the same inferences regarding Hypotheses 1 and 2.
It is possible that our reported Arab treatment effect occurs because respondents make assumptions of terrorism when an Arab name is mentioned and that our Latino treatment effect occurs because respondents make assumptions of crime when a Latino name is mentioned.
Please refer to the Online Appendix for additional details.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
Although elections are often argued to provide leaders with incentives to better respect human rights (Richards 1999; Cingranelli and Filippov 2010), recent work suggests that elections do not protect against government abuse of the right to freedom from torture (e.g., Ron 1997; Rejali 2007; Fair et al. 2010).
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the Center for the Study of Democratic Performance and the Department of Political Science at Florida State University. We are grateful to Ana Bracic, Scott Clifford, Daniel Corstange, Darren Davis, Chris Fariss, Paul Gronke, Brandon Merrill, Kristy Pathakis, Dave Siegel, Geoffrey Wallace, Thomas Zeitzoff, audiences at the 2014 and 2016 International Studies Association Annual Meetings, and colloquia at Peace Research Institute Oslo, Arizona State University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Denver for useful feedback. We also thank Dennis Langley of Florida State University for his research assistance. Unfortunately, during the final stages of our work on this paper, our friend and coauthor, Will Moore, passed away. He was a remarkable colleague, mentor, and scholar; he will be greatly missed.
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Data and replication files are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior.
Deceased: Will H. Moore.
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Conrad, C.R., Croco, S.E., Gomez, B.T. et al. Threat Perception and American Support for Torture. Polit Behav 40, 989–1009 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9433-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9433-5