This book offers an empirically sound and thought-provoking investigation of U.S. public opinion toward counterterrorism policies. In a series of clever experiments, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza demonstrate the malleability of opinion toward most of these policies, which, paradoxically, helps to explain the apparent durability of public support despite changes in the partisan environment and the passage of more than a decade since the September 11 attacks. The authors hinge their argument on the influence of pervasive messages that activate a sense of threat in the public, and on widespread negative feelings toward non-Americans and people of Middle Eastern background. Based on this analysis, they argue that the interplay of public opinion and government action has unleashed a self-reinforcing feedback process whereby rollbacks in policies like military commission trials and ethnic profiling at airports may be very unlikely for the foreseeable future. Whose Rights? an important contribution to our understanding not only of public opinion on counterterrorism issues but also of the contours and quality of contemporary American politics more generally.
Brooks and Manza’s key puzzle concerns why public support for these policies has remained consistently high even as September 11 fades into history with no significant follow-up attacks on U.S. soil, and even as the statistical chances of an attack remain minuscule compared to other threats to physical safety. The book proceeds in four parts: a historical and theoretical survey of U.S. counterterrorism and countersubversion policy and opinion (Chapters 1–2), an observational analysis of public opinion since September 11 (Chapter 3), a series of survey experiments testing several causal factors (Chapters 4–5), and an analysis of policy feedback dynamics that culminates with a broader discussion of findings and implications (Chapter 6 and Conclusion).
The book’s most interesting empirical contribution is the use of carefully designed experiments with representative samples of respondents that demonstrate the impact on public opinion of national and transnational ethnic identity cues. For example, merely describing the targets of military commission trials as people “of Middle Eastern background” substantially increases support for these trials, even when suspects are also depicted as American citizens (pp. 120–22). At the same time, conferring American identity status on suspects substantially reduces backing for several policies and policy approaches, such as the use of military trials and military prisons (p. 121) and “sacrificing individual rights and liberties” in order to prevent terrorist attacks (pp. 98–102).
Readers will also appreciate the thorough historical grounding that Whose Rights? provides for its analyses of public opinion on this politically charged issue. Brooks and Manza argue that September 11 was a breakpoint in what had been a trend of increasing support for many civil liberties that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In this sense, The book joins a burgeoning literature on public opinion related to the “war on terror.” It stands up well alongside other empirically sophisticated works that delve into this subject, including Donald R. Kinder and Cindy D. Kam’s Us Against Them (2010) and Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler’s Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (2009). Brooks and Manza’s analysis, however, distinguishes itself as a book-length treatment that focuses specifically on opinion toward policies that restrict individual rights in the name of national security.
The authors’ policy-feedback experiments identify an asymmetrical process whereby rights-restricting policies generally lead to greater support for similar approaches (pp. 135–43). This contrasts sharply with the more normatively comforting “thermostatic” response that prominent models would predict, in which public reactions to policy operate to moderate subsequent policymaking (see Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. Mackuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro-Polity, 2002). Brooks and Manza’s analysis, however, does hold out one hope for those who wish to see this public opinion trend reversed. They find that formal education generally attenuates the effects of symbolic cues that enhance support for counterterrorism policies (e.g., pp. 105–6, 121–22). It seems that education may promote cognitive sophistication and exposure to environments (including college and university campuses and postgraduation social networks) in which symbolic associations between terrorism and out-groups are likely to be weakened.
Brooks and Manza’s experiments also show that neither priming perceptions of terrorist threats nor describing the policy target as an out-group member significantly increases support for one key counterterrorism measure: torture (pp. 101–2). This apparent aversion to torture points to the book’s major shortcoming, which is its limited attention to the role of the media. During the height of the controversy over Bush administration interrogation practices, mainstream news outlets only rarely used the word “torture” (W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, “None Dare Call It Torture,” Journal of Communication 56 [September 2006]: 467–85). This may help to explain why torture, even when employed on disliked groups, seemed to many of the authors’ survey respondents to be outside the range of acceptable policies. Because of media influences, many Americans may not know that the United States has used torture, or that it was an institutionalized policy (rather than a deviation by a few rogue individuals), and they may even associate “torture” exclusively with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Experiments like those in this book, which use simple descriptive treatments (rather than realistic media portrayals), would do well to attend more closely to the mental associations that respondents may hold from previous engagements with political discourse. It is through the media that the majority of Americans receives “threat priming” messages and learns about public policies outside the experimental setting. The media is also a key socialization agent, helping to form and reinforce stereotypes and to politicize policy target groups (see James Shanahan, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, eds., Living with Television Now, 2012).
More attention to the media would also help to address the book’s occasional tendency to overstate the potential significance of the partisan switch in government in 2008. For example, in setting up their argument, Brooks and Manza assume “a very different framing environment ushered in by a Democratic president” (p. 66), and they later contend that “in the real world, opportunities are ample for rights-oriented or critical considerations to register” (p. 143). But the extent of polarization in elite discourse about this issue (beyond a few high-profile presidential speeches), and the extent to which critical frames actually register in media coverage, are empirical questions whose answers are, at best, unclear. News outlets’ well-documented tendency to reflect mainstream elite positioning (especially as defined by the president and congressional leaders), consistent threat inflation (see Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro, Selling Fear, 2011), and negative portrayals of out-groups suggest that the persistence of bipartisan public support for rights-infringing policies that these experiments causally disentangle should not be too surprising. Indeed, the authors find that partisan identification generally has negligible effects on this support (e.g., pp. 98, 118). Much political-communication literature suggests the same conclusion, and this book would have been stronger had it engaged more thoroughly with that literature.
Despite these limitations, Whose Rights? will be a valuable addition to graduate seminars and to specialized undergraduate courses on public opinion and civil liberties, and it deserves to be read widely by public-opinion researchers and by American politics scholars in general. This book provides a rigorous analysis of public attitudes toward counterterrorism policies, and its findings carry troubling implications for the capacity of ordinary democratic processes to arrest the trend toward policies that infringe on civil liberties. Brooks and Manza’s analysis suggests that the trauma inflicted on the American democratic system by September 11 will not be short-lived. This is a message for all of us to take seriously.
