Michael Cerny & Noah Dasanaike (APRW)

First Speaker & Abstract

Michael Cerny, “Specialists in Violence: Why the Military Commands Public Confidence and Congress Does Not”

Why does the U.S. military command so much more public confidence than the civilian institutions that govern it? I argue that this advantage reflects a comparison across institutions that the public evaluates through distinct cognitive frames. Building on scholarship on military professionalization and occupationalization, I distinguish between a governing frame, which evaluates institutions by their representation and accountability, and a professional frame, which evaluates them by their performance of a specialized occupational function. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the General Social Survey institutional confidence series from 1973 to 2018, I find that confidence in the military covaries more closely with confidence in banks, major companies, medicine, and organized religion than with confidence in Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court. Benchmarking the military against these institutions rather than against governing institutions closes roughly half of its apparent confidence advantage. By replicating and extending an influential survey experiment using measurement invariance tests, I then show that the military’s advantage over Congress in ethics, truthfulness, and shared values disappears once overall regard is held constant. Moreover, I find that it’s competence advantage does not reflect that of Congress and the Supreme Court but doctors, scientists, police, and teachers. These findings qualify the longstanding puzzle of military confidence by showing that much of what appears exceptional about the armed forces reflects the schema by which the American public evaluates them.

Second Speaker & Abstract

Noah Dasanaike, “Beyond Race: Inferring Partisanship among Ethnic Groups in the United States via ell-BISG”

Why does the U.S. military command so much more public confidence than the civilian institutions that govern it? I argue that this advantage reflects a comparison across institutions that the public evaluates through distinct cognitive frames. Building on scholarship on military professionalization and occupationalization, I distinguish between a governing frame, which evaluates institutions by their representation and accountability, and a professional frame, which evaluates them by their performance of a specialized occupational function. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the General Social Survey institutional confidence series from 1973 to 2018, I find that confidence in the military covaries more closely with confidence in banks, major companies, medicine, and organized religion than with confidence in Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court. Benchmarking the military against these institutions rather than against governing institutions closes roughly half of its apparent confidence advantage. By replicating and extending an influential survey experiment using measurement invariance tests, I then show that the military’s advantage over Congress in ethics, truthfulness, and shared values disappears once overall regard is held constant. Moreover, I find that it’s competence advantage does not reflect that of Congress and the Supreme Court but doctors, scientists, police, and teachers. These findings qualify the longstanding puzzle of military confidence by showing that much of what appears exceptional about the armed forces reflects the schema by which the American public evaluates them.