March 14, 2006 (4:30pm) / 2
In the nine months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration made
several arguments to sway public opinion in favor of war. One loomed largest: Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction and it was going to use them. The WMD argument was most prominent
because the Bush administration chose to promote it over the others, and it made that choice
because it believed that Americans were more likely to be swayed by the threat of WMD than
invasion, and shortly afterward, it became overwhelming. In the months before the war, Iraq
possessed no weapons of mass destruction and was not attempting to make or acquire them
(Gellman 2004). As students of public opinion, we should wonder: if supporters of the war had
been disabused in time—if, after months of believing that Hussein’s regime possessed WMD,
they had been persuaded that it did not—what would have happened? How would public support
for the war have changed?
We don’t know the answer to that question. But we do know that, as a general matter,
the way in which citizens respond to political information is an empirical question with
normative import. Empirically, we expect attitudes to bear some connection to facts and to
change as relevant new facts come to light. And normatively, this is what the dominant strands of
democratic theory prescribe: that citizens know truths about politics and use them to shape their
views.
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It seems almost redundant to add that people should not be influenced by falsehoods.
But while great effort has been spent to determine what people know about politics (e.g., Delli
“know”—i.e., believe—false factual claims about politics. Still less has been spent to examine
the possibility that people are influenced by messages that they know to be false.
If anything, a nearly opposite assumption is made: people may be deceived but they will,
if convinced of the truth, change their views accordingly. This appears to be why a common
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Convention