Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime:
A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan
∗
Jason Lyall
†
Graeme Blair
‡
Kosuke Imai
§
First Draft: September 20, 2011
This Draft: December 23, 2012
Abstract
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects
conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian
attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated
provinces of Afghanistan — the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments
to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions about support for different combatants. We
demonstrate that civilian attitudes are asymmetric in nature. Harm inflicted by the International Secu-
rity Assistance Force (ISAF) is met with reduced support for ISAF and increased support for the Tal-
iban, but Taliban-inflicted harm does not translate into greater ISAF support. We combine a multistage
sampling design with hierarchical modeling to estimate ISAF and Taliban support at the individual,
village, and district levels, permitting a more fine-grained analysis of wartime attitudes than previously
possible.
Key Words: civilian casualties; endorsement experiments; intergroup conflict; multilevel modeling;
public opinion; sensitive questions
∗
We thank the Opinion Research Center of Afghanistan (ORCA), and especially Rafiq Kakar, Abdul Nabi Barekzai, Mr.
Soor Gul, Zabihullah Usmani, and Mr. Asadi, along with district managers and the 149 enumerators who conducted the survey,
for helpful feedback and excellent work under trying conditions. Our program manager, Prakhar Sharma, deserves special
thanks. We also thank Will Bullock, Sarah Chayes, Jeff Checkel, Christina Davis, Dan Gingerich, Don Green, Betsy Levy
Paluck, and Abbey Steele, along with two APSR Editors and three anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments on an earlier
version. The survey instruments, pretest data, or earlier versions of the paper benefited from feedback from seminar partic-
ipants at the 2010 American Political Science Association annual meeting, George Washington University, Duke University,
the University of Pennsylvania, the Ohio State University, University of California—San Diego, the Juan March Institute, the
University of British Columbia, Cornell University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Washing-
ton. Financial support for the survey from Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies’s Field Experiment Initiative and the
Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies is gratefully acknowledged. Additional support from the Air Force Office
of Scientific Research (Lyall; Grant FA9550-09-1-0314) and the National Science Foundation (Imai; Grant SES–0849715) is
also acknowledged. This research was approved by Yale’s Human Subjects Committee under IRB protocol #1006006952. An
online appendix is available with further details about the survey and analyses.
†
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520. Phone:
203–432–5264, Email: jason.lyall@yale.edu, URL: http://pantheon.yale.edu/
˜
jml27
‡
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544. Email: gblair@princeton.edu, URL:
http://www.princeton.edu/
˜
gblair
§
Associate Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544. Phone: 609–258–6601, Email:
kimai@princeton.edu, URL: http://imai.princeton.edu
How does the victimization of civilians affect their support for combatants during wartime? Are the
effects of violence on attitudes uniform across warring parties, or are they conditional on who inflicted
the harm? Despite a widespread belief that modern counterinsurgency hinges on “winning hearts and
minds,” scholars have yet to address the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with study-
ing civilian attitudes in wartime settings. Existing theories of civil war violence almost entirely sidestep
the question of civilian attitudes. Instead, these theories either assume that attitudes are merely endogenous
to battlefield dynamics — and thus not of central theoretical concern — or that civilians treat perpetrators
of violence in an undifferentiated fashion. Civilians, existing accounts tacitly assume, are simply guided
by a logic of survival that denies them the luxury of taking into consideration prior ethnic or ideological
attachments, thus eliminating the need to study wartime attitudes.
We challenge this view by arguing that the effects of violence on civilian attitudes are conditional on
combatant identity (Lyall, 2010). We contend that intergroup bias — the systematic tendency to interpret
the actions of one’s own in-group in a more favorable light than those of the out-group — should produce
robust and observable asymmetries in how combatant actions affect civilian attitudes. Simply put, it is
likely that harm by one’s own group carries a different set of implications and effects than victimization
by members of an out-group. We anticipate that in-group harm does not lead to either increased support for
the out-group or to significant loss of support for in-group combatants. Harm by the out-group, however,
is likely to increase out-group antipathy while heightening support for in-group combatants.
To test this argument, we conducted a survey in the very heart of the current Taliban insurgency
(Barfield, 2010; Jones, 2009; Crews and Tarzi, 2008; Giustozzi, 2008) that utilizes multiple endorsement
experiments to measure civilian attitudes toward the Taliban and the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. We combine a multistage sampling design with multilevel statistical model-
ing (Bullock, Imai and Shapiro, 2011) to examine attitudes among 2,754 male respondents in 204 villages
within 21 districts of five Pashtun-dominated provinces.
Three main findings emerge. First, there is clear evidence that the effects of victimization by ISAF and
the Taliban have asymmetrical effects on individual attitudes. Harm inflicted by ISAF is met with reduced
support for ISAF and increased support for the Taliban. In contrast, Taliban-inflicted harm does not trans-
1
late into greater support for ISAF and has only a marginally negative effect on Taliban support. Second,
subsequent efforts by each combatant to mitigate the effects of the harm they caused among aggrieved
individuals actually appear to be successful, though in ISAF’s case this finding rests on a small subset of
selected individuals given ISAF’s haphazard approach to responding to civilian casualties.
1
Third, we find
little support for alternative explanations that privilege prior patterns of violence, the current distribution
of territorial control by the combatants, or the role of economic assistance in determining civilian attitudes.
1 Theory and Hypotheses
1.1 Motivation: Rational Peasants, Civilian Agency, and Wartime Attitudes
A near consensus now exists among practitioners around the notion that counterinsurgency wars are de-
cided by the relative success each combatant enjoys in winning popular support from the civilian pop-
ulation (Mao, 1961; Thompson, 1966; Trinquier, 2006; U.S. Army, 2007; Kilcullen, 2009). From the
counterinsurgent’s perspective, victory is obtained through a combination of service provision, material
assistance, information campaigns and, above all, restraint on the use of one’s force with the goal of
minimizing civilian casualties. From the Vietnam-era Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) to contemporary
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, winning the “hearts and minds” of the civilian population — or at least an
important subset of it — is a central element of counterinsurgency campaigns.
Surprisingly, however, there are few rigorous empirical studies of civilian attitudes toward combatants
during wartime (see Beath, Christia and Enikolopov, 2011, for a recent exception). To be sure, this gap
is due in part to the logistical and ethical issues that accompany survey research in a wartime setting.
Even if surveys could be conducted safely, methodological issues abound: social desirability bias, high
refusal rates, and preference falsification may frustrate efforts to obtain reliable answers, especially if
sensitive issues such as support for combatants are investigated using direct questions (e.g., DeMaio,
1984; Berinsky, 2004). As a result, one leading scholar has argued we should “bracket [the] question of
individual motives and attitudes” (Kalyvas, 2006, 101) in favor of theories that emphasize the more easily
observable structure of opportunities and constraints facing civilians in wartime (see also Leites and Wolf,
1
In fact, only 164 of our respondents were approached by ISAF after victimization, while the Taliban approached 535
respondents. See Figure 12 for the full distribution of responses to the harm and approach questions.
2
1970, 45).
Indeed, the prevailing view of civilians in the civil war literature suggests they are “rational peasants”
(Popkin, 1979), that is, utility-maximizing agents driven by the short-term dictates of survival. With-
out strong ethnic or ideological attachments, civilians seek to minimize their exposure to harm from the
combatants while maximizing the benefits offered by combatants, including material assistance and basic
security. Based on this consensus, our theories concentrated on explaining which factors drive civilian
behavior: the relative balance of control exercised by combatants (Leites and Wolf, 1970; Kalyvas, 2006;
Kalyvas and Kocher, 2007), competitive service provision (Akerlof and Yellen, 1994; Crost and Johnston,
2010; Berman, Shapiro and Felter, 2011), and relative levels of civilian victimization (Stoll, 1993; Kocher,
Pepinsky and Kalyvas, 2011; Condra and Shapiro, 2012, 183–84), to name only three. Prior allegiances,
if present at all, are thought to be easily recast in the face of a given mixture of (threatened) punishments
and (promised) rewards levied by combatants who aim to exercise control over the civilian population.
Despite privileging different independent variables, these theories converge on the same empirical pre-
diction: civilians should respond symmetrically to combatant actions. Put differently, civilians should be
indifferent to which combatant provides material assistance (Collier and Hoeffler 2004, 569; Mampilly
2011, 54–55; Berman, Shapiro and Felter 2011, 776) or victimizes them (Stoll 1993, 20; Kalyvas 2006,
111–19; Condra and Shapiro 2012, 183–84). What matters is the type and amount of aid or violence,
not which combatant is responsible for these actions, since civilians cannot afford to discriminate when
their survival is at stake. We would therefore expect civilians to respond uniformly to similar assistance
provided by foreign and domestic non-governmental organizations, for example. Similarly, these theo-
ries expect civilians to provide information to each side equally and routinely, with the choice of which
combatant to inform being dictated only by prevailing levels of control or violence.
Yet the empirical findings in these studies are often inconsistent with the baseline expectation of con-
stant causal effects. The effects of aid programs on violence reduction in Afghanistan, for example, appear
to hinge on the ethnic composition of a district, not the level of control or prior violence (Beath, Christia
and Enikolopov, 2011). Similarly, small-scale aid programs in Iraq have heterogeneous effects across
Sunni and non-Sunni dominated districts (Berman, Shapiro and Felter, 2011). In addition, Condra and
3
Shapiro (2012)’s findings suggest that Sunni districts exhibit markedly different pre- and post-civilian ca-
sualty patterns of violence than Shia or mixed districts. In each case, it appears that civilians are responding
asymmetrically, rather than uniformly, to combatants. If responses are conditional on combatant identities,
then we need to theorize how heterogeneity in the effects of aid and violence — variation according to
who is rewarding or punishing civilians — affects attitudes and subsequent behavior asymmetrically.
Second, these theories rely on indicators of civilian behavior that are observationally equivalent with
multiple causal mechanisms. As a result, we are left unable to adjudicate between competing accounts
or, more simply, to explain why a particular relationship exists. Kalyvas (2006) acknowledges, for ex-
ample, his central independent variable, the relative distribution of combatant control, generates its ef-
fects via at least six different mechanisms, three of them attitudinal in nature (124–32). Observational
data cannot tease apart these different mechanisms; only by directly measuring attitudes can the relative
influence of each mechanism be determined.
2
Getting the mechanisms right also has important policy
implications: it matters whether civilians are providing tips to insurgents because they fear punishment
for non-cooperation or if they genuinely support the rebel cause since the policy response is likely to be
different even if rebel control is constant in these scenarios.
1.2 Why Identity Matters: Intergroup Bias and Support for Combatants
We argue that wartime attitudes are shaped by intergroup biases that create durable expectations about the
responsibility and blame for combatant actions toward the civilian population. These biases lead civilians
to condition their interpretation of events on the perpetrator’s identity (Lyall, 2010). As a result, we expect
that support for combatants will depend on the combatant’s identity, as will the effects of actions taken by
the combatants.
We define intergroup bias as the systematic tendency by individuals to evaluate one’s own membership
group (the “in-group”) more favorably than a group one does not belong to (the “out-group”) (Tajfel,
1970; Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Hewstone, Rubin and Willis, 2002, p. 576).
3
Positive actions by one’s own
2
The same criticism holds true for work on civilian victimization, where mechanisms purporting to explain civilian behavior
have proliferated but research designs capable of testing them have not.
3
The literature on social categorization theory, and related fields such as prejudice, discrimination and biased assimilation
theory, is enormous. For overviews, see Tajfel (2010), Hewstone, Rubin and Willis (2002), Lord, Ross and Lepper (1979), and
Paluck and Green (2009).
4
