Comparative Public Attitudes about Drone Strikes: Survey Experiments in Italy, Poland, and Germany

Abstract Research on public attitudes about the use and efficacy of drone strikes primarily focuses on the United States. While there is a burgeoning second generation of public opinion research on drone strikes and drone warfare, in general, our understanding of cross-national public attitudes remains limited, particularly if non-US respondents behave and/or think differently. To address this, we extend Krep’s (2014) and Walsh and Schulzke’s (2018) research and conduct four surveys in three countries (Italy, Poland, and Germany) with 5,485 respondents to investigate how individuals outside the United States interpret ethical, moral, and casualty aversion framing in relation to support for drone strikes. Our results show that in all three countries, like the United States, respondents prefer drone strikes to traditional military operations but that support for drone strikes decreases when prompted with ethical and moral framing. Additional information about casualty aversion and reducing the physical risk to servicemembers’ lives does not significantly influence support for drone strikes compared to traditional military operations.