THE POLLS—REVIEW REPLY TO BERINSKY AND DRUCKMAN: SUCCESS STILL MATTERS

Weappreciate Berinsky and Druckman’s thoughtful critique of our recent work regarding the public’s willingness to bear the costs of war (Berinsky, A., J. Druckman. 2007. “Public Opinion Research and Support for the Iraq War.” Public Opinion Quarterly 71:126–41). We are fortunate to have such pre-eminent scholars constructively engaging our work. In their review, the authors raise four major concerns about our analysis: (1) our measurement of “war support, ” (2) our measurement of perceptions of success, (3) our claim that perceived success is a cause of war support (measured as casualty tolerance), and (4) our lack of attention to elite rhetoric as a cause of war support. We address each of these concerns below. While we remain confident in our original conclusions, we believe that their comments identify important questions that remain unanswered in this area of research. Casualty Tolerance as “War Support” Berinsky and Druckman argue that our principal dependent variable is a poor measure of support for war. Instead, they argue for a more generalized measur