WAR, CASUALTIES, AND PUBLIC-OPINION

The authors begin the construction of a generalizable theory of casual ties and opinion, reexamining the logic employed by Mueller and showin g that although human costs are an important predictor of wartime opin ion, Mueller's operationalization of those costs solely as the log of cumulative national casualties is problematic and incomplete. The auth ors argue that temporally proximate costs, captured as marginal casual ty figures, are an important additional aspect of human costs and a cr itical factor in determining wartime opinion. Using Mueller's data on opinion in the Vietnam and Korean wars, the authors find that marginal casualties are important in explaining opinion when casualty accumula tion is accelerating, and earlier findings about the importance and ge neralizability of the log of cumulative casualties as the sole casualt y-based predictor of opinion are overstated. Finally, the authors offe r some thoughts about other factors that should be considered when bui lding a model of war deaths and domestic opinion.