Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper draws on John Zaller's model of persuasion to help explain and predict the belief that Saddam Hussein aided in the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Narrowly construed, the purpose of this paper is to use the rhetoric generated by the execution of Saddam Hussein as a point of departure to examine if, and how, it illustrates an emerging European identity, particularly one constructed from a perceived opposition to a barbaric, stagnant, and vigilante American presence. It questions: how does the European response to Saddam Hussein’s execution reflect the belief that the abolition of capital punishment has become a distinctly “European” trait? Moreover, how does the use of such rhetoric reinforce particular cultural convictions about Europe as a civilized entity while simultaneously reaffirming the barbaric quality of an alien other? Ultimately, this paper concludes that what is important about the execution of Saddam Hussein is neither whether the execution was indeed barbaric, nor whether the photographs or videos depicting such an act somehow compromised the European quest for the global elimination of capital punishment. Rather, it determines that what is important are the multiple ways in which hierarchical language is deployed as an element to structure and order individual nations, a practice that attempts to define “Europe” by defining what it is not.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholarship recognizes that political leaders craft public communications in a strategic manner and use mass media as a political resource. We argue that during summer and autumn 2002 President George W. Bush extended the September 11 crisis through emphasis in public communications on internal "homeland" security and an external "war on terror"—discourses into which Iraq was carefully inserted over time. These strategic communications allowed the president to dominate U.S. news content, helped Republicans gain control of Congress, and propelled the United States toward war with Iraq. Our analysis shows that Bush’s emphasis on three themes in combination with a particular ordering of discourse facilitated a seamless evolution from a focus solely on Homeland Security legislation to one that highlighted the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without substantive changes in the accompanying arguments. We also analyze U.S. news coverage during the same dates, revealing that news media closely followed the president’s messages and points of focus about these topics.

Publication Type: Paper/Poster Proposal
Abstract: Before, during, and after the major combat operations in Iraq of Gulf War II, public opinion polls showed that a large proportion of Americans – a majority in some cases – believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks. This paper uses June 2004 data collected by the National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) to test how well John Zaller’s model of persuasion predicts this belief. Zaller’s model holds that the probability of holding a certain belief depends largely upon the probability of being exposed to a certain message and the acceptance of the message. Preliminary analyses suggest that the model does indeed largely explain belief that Saddam Hussein aided the September 11th terrorists. An already-completed analysis of NAES data gathered in June 2003 provided evidence that 1) approval for President Bush was highly correlated with the likelihood of believing in Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the September 11th attacks and 2) frequency of newspaper-readership interacted significantly with approval for President Bush to predict likelihood of believing in Saddam’s involvement. In other words, the more Bush detractors read the newspaper, the less likely they were to believe in Saddam’s involvement. One year later, NAES asked again about Saddam’s involvement. This paper will use both the June 2003 data and the June 2004 data to engage in a more precise test of Zaller’s model with regard to beliefs about Saddam’s involvement in the September 11th attacks.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Why did so many Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks? Althaus and Largio argue that the resilience of this belief was in fact an artifact of pollsters’ switch to forced-choice questions: although open-ended survey questions find very small percentages blaming Saddam for 9/11, forced choice questions reveal a high proportion of the public willing to believe in Saddam Hussein’s culpability even before the administration shifted its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that this means that “The American public’s apparently widespread belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks was no feat of misdirection by the Bush administration. Instead, the Bush administration inherited and played into a favorable climate of public opinion” (Althaus and Largio, 2004). But where did this favorable climate of public opinion come from? We suggest that answers on forced-choice questions and support for politicians’ actions are both examples of inferred justification: when responding to forced-choice questions, respondents assume that there is a good reason why a name is present among a list of choices (even if there is not); similarly, in judging politicians' actions, voters assume that there is a good reason why a politician supports a policy measure, particularly one as consequential as the decision to go to war. We test this theory on a sample of respondents in Illinois, and show that 20% of respondents give an inferred justification response. In essence, in invading Iraq the administration presented the public with the equivalent of a forced choice survey question of whether or not Saddam was responsible for 9/11; some respondents concluded that, if we invaded Iraq, there must have been a good reason for doing so, and 9/11 seemed to them the most obvious justification.