Since 1995, presidents from both parties have increased US government initiatives in pursuit of global gender equality, but there has been little scholarly work that explores public support for these initiatives. We analyze the level of citizen support for several types of global gender equality programs. In addition, we explore support for one specific rationale for the policy –the argument that the participation of women in decision-making will make the world a more peaceful place. Our central hypothesis is that personal security dispositions are an important correlate of support for global gender initiatives, and our analysis yields support for the hypothesis. Citizens who place a high value on personal security display stronger support for gender equality in foreign policy. We close with suggestions for further research and discuss the policy implications of our findings, in particular with respect to public opinion on the use of military force.

What factors influence an individual's concern for personal security and safety? Prior research shows that women exhibit higher levels of fear, anxiety, and perceived threat. These differences in threat perceptions have important policy consequences, including the fact that women display lower support for military interventions, lower support for retaliation against terrorist groups, and lower levels of support for using torture. However, previous research has not fully investigated the origins of these differences in concern for safety and security, which we refer to as "personal security dispositions." We ask if these differences are the result of lived experience, socialization, or both. Specifically, our analysis explores the extent to which personal security dispositions can be traced to parental warnings about safety and avoiding danger. Our findings indicate that both gender identity and parental socialization have an impact on security dispositions. We conclude the article with a discussion of avenues for further research and the policy implications of our findings, in particular with respect to public opinion on issues such as support for the international use of military force.

We ask two questions in this article: First, what is the level of public support for the pursuit of gender equality in foreign policy? Second, what are the most significant correlates of that support? We report the results of the first national opinion survey that queried citizens about their support for policies to increase global gender equality. We find that an average of 60 to 90 percent approve of pursuing gender equality and specific programmatic initiatives. Americans also strongly agree with one rationale for pursuing global gender equality: 65 percent agree that “The world would be a more peaceful place if more women were involved in making decisions.” Second, we find that a number of individual characteristics and personal values are strongly correlated with support for gender initiatives. Our results also suggest that women's greater endorsement of universalism values explains their higher levels of support for global gender equality.

Abstract Scholars and governments are interested in four sets of questions concerning public opinion on foreign policy and national security policy. First, what do public opinion polls measure? How do citizens, who are generally uninformed about foreign policy and world affairs, form opinions on these matters? Second, how rational is public opinion? Is it stable or volatile? Are opinions coherent? Do opinions plausibly reflect the flow of world events? Third, what factors influence the formation of citizen opinions? Specifically, what is the impact of fundamental attitudes toward war and military force, partisanship, ideology, and gender? Finally, how universal are the determinants of citizen opinion, especially on crucial issues of war and peace? Are the findings in global comparisons the same as those in the American or European contexts? Considerable scholarship has been devoted to these four questions. Scholars now characterize public opinion as rational, in the sense that it is fairly stable, coherent, and responsive to real world events. Attitudes toward war and military force are a major focus of the research literature because many specific policy attitudes flow from fundamental views of war. Gender has also become a major focus of research because many studies find that women are less supportive of the use of military force for most purposes. Finally, scholars are beginning to discover that some opinion patterns are universal across societies, while others are more affected by the individual characteristics of national societies. Studies of global public opinion have expanded greatly, with recent scholarship focusing on global attitudes toward gender equality, immigration, and climate change.

Recent scholarship indicates that gender correlates strongly with Americans' attitudes toward the use of military force. However, most of its evidence derives from the study of major wars, and the field needs more historical research to evaluate the evolution of gender difference over time. I redress these limitations by updating and extending my earlier (2003) analysis of public support for the use of force during the 1990s. I analyze 965 individual survey questions concerning the use of US military force in twenty-four historical episodes, beginning in 1982 with military aid to El Salvador and continuing through the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. I find that substantial gender difference characterizes a large number of historical episodes and types of military action. Nonetheless, the magnitude of gender difference varies substantially; in many cases, a substantial percentage of women supports the use of force. The difference between men and women varies most with the salience and level of violence, and women are more sensitive to humanitarian concerns. Women display more sensitivity to casualties in some historical cases, but during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the casualty sensitivity of men gradually increased as the wars dragged on, and gender differences therefore decreased. Thus, I argue that scholars should turn their attention to studying individual-level differences between and among men and women in support for using military force. I also discuss the political and policy implications of the findings.

Recent scholarship has raised the hypothesis that gender difference in attitudes toward global issues may be rooted in a broader gender difference in world views, perhaps along the familiar liberal-realist divide. However, evidence for this hypothesis is limited. Most research examines gender difference in the US, and there is an almost exclusive focus on gender difference in attitudes toward military force and war. This paper offers a broader perspective and more cross-national evidence. Specifically, I examine gender difference in opinion surveys from more than forty countries across three categories of global issues: military power and balance of power, global institutions and their legitimacy, and military force and war. Taking the evidence as a whole, my major finding is that gender difference is greatest on issues of violence, force, and war. Second, it is only in the US that gender polarization characterizes general views of international institutions, but there is evidence in global opinion that multilateral military interventions lower gender difference, and women demonstrate less support for expending resources in the pursuit of power.

We study the factors that influence citizen support for defense spending in fourteen democracies over the period 2004–2013. We pose two research questions. First, what factors influence citizen support for war and military force? We refer to this as the acceptability of war. Second, in addition to the acceptability of war, what other factors affect support for defense spending? Our principal finding is that citizen acceptance of war and support for defense spending are most influenced by basic beliefs and values. Gender also has a strong negative influence on attitudes toward war and thus indirectly lowers support for defense spending among women. Attitudes toward war and defense spending are also sometimes influenced by short-term threats and by alliance considerations, but the effects are not as substantively meaningful. We conclude with a summary of the results and a discussion of the implications for theory and policy.

There is ample evidence from the US context that women, although hardly pacifist, are less supportive of the use of military force than are men. However, the evidence is largely restricted to one conflict episode (the first Gulf War), and there is almost no cross-national evidence that would allow us to evaluate important hypotheses (especially concerning the universality of gender differences). In this paper, I aim to close this gap in the evidence. The most important finding is this: Gender differences vary substantially across societies and within a number of international conflicts. The data therefore cast doubt on any theory that would predict constant gender differences, most importantly any biological explanation, but also the version of Goldstein’s hypothesis that relates universally gendered war socialization to the pervasiveness of the “war system”.

Recent scholarship indicates that gender is a strong correlate of Americans' attitudes toward the use of military force. However, most of the existing evidence is based on a limited number of military actions. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by analyzing 965 individual survey questions that query support for using US military force in twenty four historical episodes, beginning in 1982 with military aid to El Salvador and continuing through the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. I conclude that gender difference is generalized over a large number of historical episodes and types of military action. Nonetheless, gender difference does vary substantially, and in many cases a substantial percentage of women supports the use of force. The difference between men and women varies most with the salience and level of violence, and women are more sensitive to humanitarian concerns. Women are more sensitive to casualties in many historical cases, but during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the casualty sensitivity of men gradually increased and the gender difference decreased. I argue that scholars should turn their attention to studying individual-level differences among men and women in support for using military force.

Americans remained engaged in a contentious debate: whether the US government should engage in the torture of prisoners as a matter of explicit policy. Given the controversy that surrounds the issue and the number of surveys conducted, there has been surprisingly little scholarly work that seeks to explain not just the percentage of Americans who support torture, but exactly which citizens express that support. In this article, I analyze the correlates of support for torture in American public opinion, with particular attention to contextual variation in the relative impact of partisanship and gender. I analyze several different surveys over the period 2004-2011 and find that partisanship usually dominates as a correlate of torture support. However, both in 2004 and in early 2009, gender had a stronger influence on support for torture. I argue that the influence of gender was heightened by the substantial publicity that accompanied the release of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in April 2004 and the attention to moral arguments against torture that resulted from the announcement of President Obama’s executive order that banned torture in January 2009. The implications for the study of torture and gender politics are discussed together with some observations about torture as a political issue.

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