Poll:Voters Prefer Military Spending Cuts to Reduce the Deficit (2013)

Military Spending Cuts to Reduce the Deficit?

Polls have found that more voters favor slashing military spending vs. cutting spending on domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the debt and deficit.

49% of respondents said they would support cutting military spending, while just 23% said they would support slashing Social Security and Medicare. An overwhelming majority, 69% said they would oppose cuts to social programs.

37% Said the US spends too much on the military and 38% said we are spending just the right amount. Only 18% said too little.

Some Political Cartoons on Military and National Defense spending showing different perspectives on the issue

Explanations for citizen support of public policies like military and national defense spending

What leads people to support Public Policy like Military and National Defense spending? excerpted from my research proposal (Zehnder 2014)

There are conflicting explanations among the reasons for citizen support of public policies like military and national defense spending. Psychological research attributes fear for support of military spending, more specifically fear of terrorism in the United States. Political Science research attributes state characteristics as the leading cause for support of military spending. State characteristics are the characteristics of a political state such as geographic location (North, or South), state of the union, racial ethnicity, number of military personnel in a state, economic benefit in a state from military and political climate based on recent public policy decisions or wars. In a study conducted by Tuzuner, Dolu, and Uludag, (2012) researchers conducted an experiment to find which explanation was correct. They concluded that state characteristics, the Political Science explanation is the leading cause of support for public policy showing that state characteristics of American citizens such as living in the Southern states leads to more support of military spending (Tuzuner et. al. 2012).

Polls and news sources vary displaying their in their results of American opinions on Military spending. However, over the years you can notice some trends. Torres-Reyna and Shapiro (2002) investigated trends over the years in public opinion of military spending using the state characteristics of budget tradeoffs, views on the quality of America’s defenses, and confidence in the military as explanations for these trends. They found that long term views on military spending were influenced most strongly by the state characteristics of  popularity of wars we were in, existing threats to the United States, and perceived strength of the military (Torres-Reyna, Shapiro, 2002).

References

Torres-Reyna, O., Shapiro, R.Y. (2002), The polls trends: defense and the military. Public Opinion Quarterly, 66(2), 279-303.            

Tuzuner, M., Dolu, O., Uludag, S. (2012), Unraveling the determinants or public support for anti-terrorism policies in the united states: fear of terrorism and state contextual characteristics. Review of International Law and Politics, 8(32), 97-115. 

-Corey Zehnder

  

 

Take my Military and National Defense Spending survey if you are an undergraduate college student!

I have created a survey with the purpose of measuring undergraduate college students' views on military and national defense spending. This is interesting research and you can be apart of it. Once I have enough participants, I will post the final result on this blog, so you can visibly see the results.


Click here to take the survey

Your participation in this exciting research is greatly appreciated
-Corey Zehnder

 

Americans Have Most Confidence in Military, Least in Congress, pretty interesting revelation...

The Trend Line: Americans' Views on Military Spending Are Steady a more in depth view

Do Americans feel that our National Defense is stronger than it needs to be? 

This graph clearly shows that Americans believed our national defense strength was the right amount from 1984- 2006 respectively. Only in 2006- 2008 do we see a resurgence of our national defense not being strong enough, and this was most likely due to the financial crisis of 2007 causing anxiety in many citizens due to them losing their jobs. Generally speaking though, Americans believe that our national defense is about the right amount.

The graph was retrieved here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1666/military-national-defense.aspx