Who Should Fight? Experimental Evidence on Policy Corrections to the Unequal Costs of US Wars

The physical costs of war—who fights and experiences casualties—are borne unequally in the USA. However, little is known about how informing individuals about this disparity affects preferences about how to address it. We introduce a framework of “policy corrections” that differentially allocates the costs associated with providing public goods to socioeconomic groups. A formal model then presents competing perspectives, for example, in-group versus altruistic, on how citizens would prefer these policies. A survey experiment tests how informing Americans that low-income communities disproportionately bear the physical costs of US wars affects their support for each policy correction. Our empirical results reveal heightened support for increased military recruitment among the wealthiest half of Americans (a direct correction), but unchanged preferences for increasing taxes on this group (an indirect correction). Textual analysis of open-ended responses suggests that treated respondents’ preferences for policy corrections are motivated by notions of fairness. Our results suggest that war casualties transcend in-group socioeconomic calculus, leading even individuals who benefit from the disparity to support redressing the unequal costs associated with the provision of defense.