1
Transatlantic Warfare Rhetoric and Prospect Theory
Henrike Viehrig, University of Bonn
Paper presented at the
8th Pan-European Conference on International Relations
18-21 September 2013
Warsaw, Poland
Modern military interventions are complex decisions that involve a diversity of actors. In this paper I
compare how military interventions have been explained in Germany and in the United States since
1999. Although both countries have a very different background concerning their military tradition and
their role in the current international system, they are alike regarding their domestic imperatives: both
governments have to explain their decisions to their respective audiences at home. Linking the
persuasive power of framing processes with insights about differing risk orientation that are provided by
Prospect Theory, the main question is how both governments were able to prevail in the media
discourse preceding the start of military interventions. Although both discourses are regarded
separately, they give a telling account about the state of the transatlantic relations during the past
decade.
Justifications for or against military interventions have a great impact on their initial approval as well on
their long-term judgment. Barack Obama’s recent address to the nation about a possible Syria
intervention caused huge public interest and triggered enormous media coverage. A brief reflection of
the arguments that Barack Obama voiced in his Syria speech to the nation shows that the rhetorical
justifications have an impact on the approval of a military intervention. Other conflicts have evoked
similar discussions and thus merit looking at the debates that precede military interventions.
Regarding the selection of military interventions, this paper includes the interventions in Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as well as the conflict over Iran which did not lead to direct military action
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(yet). Given the different intervention behavior of the US and Germany, this study thus includes cases
that are characterized by military intervention (for Germany: Kosovo and Afghanistan; for the US:
Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya) and cases in which the countries did not participate (for Germany:
Iraq, Iran and Libya; for the US: Iran). However, the participation is less an issue than the discussion and
the ways in which the prospective interventions’ goals were framed, since it focuses on those arguments
that were exchanged before any boots hit the ground.
1 Prospect Theory
Prospect Theory provides a fruitful ground to analyze the rhetoric that accompanies modern military
interventions. Originally designed as an individual theory of choice under the condition of risk
(Kahneman and Tversky 1979), it has found numerous applications in the political sciences (Levy 2003).
Prospect Theory provides a particularly sharp lens for the study of justifications for or against military
interventions. It distinguishes between arguments in which decision-makers promise to achieve a gain by
using military force on the one hand, or to prevent a loss on the other hand. Prospect Theory further
focuses on rhetorically established reference points which serve as a basis or evaluative anchor for
judging whether the prospect of an action is perceived as a loss or as a gain. Thus, there are several links
that connect Prospect Theory with Foreign Policy Analysis and concepts like framing which are borrowed
from Communications. Such a combination channels the widely used framing concept into succinct loss
or gain categories and allows for a more focused look on elite rhetoric and media discourse during wars.
Thus, Prospect Theory permits a comparative approach across countries, administrations and decisions
for or against military interventions and aims to include the multiple goals of military interventions – a
hallmark of post-Cold-War interventions – into a coherent framework.
Framing can be regarded as an attempt of decision-makers to influence the perceptions, attitudes and
reactions of selected audiences (Mintz and Redd 2003: 194). When communicating military
interventions, decisionmakers use frames to structure the abstract notion of military action into palpable
steps and thus into a coherent story that makes the use of force seem logical and appropriate. Since
military interventions are a risky endeavor, decision-makers face the difficulty to advocate a risky
strategy in front of a risk-averse public audience. Adding to studies that apply Prospect Theory with a
focus on decision-makers’ calculations (Brummer 2012; He and Feng 2013), this study extends Prospect
Theory to analyze public approval or disapproval. In doing so, it involves the assumption that each citizen
is making the same decision as a decision-maker based on his or her subjective reference point.
Connecting Prospect Theory to the study of public opinion seems worthwhile, because public opinion
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judges risks in a peculiar way: combining emotions, judging acceptability of risks as well as ways of
handling it (McDermott 2011: 409).
With regard to military interventions, one and the same prospect – attacking a country – can be framed
with regard to a different goal. Before the start of the Kosovo intervention, President Clinton said:
“People of Kosovo have to be able to live in their own country without having to fear for their own lives”
(New York Times 25 Mar 99). Here, military action serves to enable the Kosovar population to live in
security, thus trying to achieve a gain in the eyes of the Kosovars (and in the eyes of the intervening
nation). The prospects of the Kosovo were expressed somewhat differently in a New York Times
editorial: “The bombing must begin quickly before [Milosevics] rampage takes more lives” (24 Mar 99).
Here, the prospect of military action is to prevent further losses for the Kosovars and, thus, for the
American public as well. What is more, both frames are centered on the same reference point, stating
that the local population of Kosovo is in mortal danger.
Prospect Theory, in its original sense, is about calculations in risky environments (Levy 2003). It states
that possible outcomes of a political move are not judged objectively from a net asset level, but
subjectively based on a reference point (Mintz and Redd 2003: 195–6). Starting from the reference point,
possible outcomes are valued either as a loss (compared to the perceived status quo) or as a gain.
Objectively, there is similar benefit to the prospect of either preventing a loss or achieving a gain.
However, audiences tend to take more risks in order to prevent a loss than to obtain additional gains
(Kahneman and Tversky 1979). Subsequently, when policymakers propose to avoid a loss, the audience
should be more likely to favor a risky measure than when the proposed policy promises to achieve a
gain. This happens because individual risk orientation differs, depending on whether a proposed action
alters the prospects in a negative or in a positive way, i.e. proposing to prevent a loss or to achieve a gain
(McDermott et al. 2008). I thus hypothesize (1) that military interventions receive more public support if
they are discussed in terms of preventing losses rather than achieving gains.
Given that, it should become obvious that policymakers are well advised to convince the public by
presenting the objectives of a military intervention in terms of loss frames, which leads to the hypothesis
(2) that the discourse about military interventions is predominated by loss frames.
However, Germany has a different military tradition and participates in international military
interventions only in accordance with partners. Hence, Germany’s goals of a military intervention are
usually different from US goals. I thus hypothesize (3) that the German discourse consists of more gain
frames than the American discourse.
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Prospect Theory is not only about the prospects of a policy action (i.e. preventing a loss or achieving a
gain). It is also about the underlying reference point, from which the possible outcome of a political
move is going to be judged (a loss/a gain compared to what status?). For Prospect Theory’s focus on the
reference point, it has also been characterized as “reference dependent” (Levy 2003: 216). Obviously,
the prospect of achieving a gain or preventing a loss needs an evaluative anchor, which allows calculating
the presented options. To evaluate whether a military intervention is worth taking any risks, therefore, is
strongly connected to the current perception of a country’s position with regard to the conflict in
question. After 9/11, for example, the public at large was more convinced that a military intervention is
necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks. In more peaceful times –when debating the Libya
intervention in 2011, for example – military action appeared less tempting due to the relative stable
position of Germany’s and the United States’ international security. Nevertheless, reference points are
flexible and tend to move in the light of current discourses. Therefore, they are suitable targets for
political oratory. Each actor of the framing process choses between framing alternatives and transforms
them into an individual set of attitudes. For that individual aspect, but also for its dynamic approach, the
concept of framing and Prospect Theory combine in an ideal way. As regards the reference point, I
hypothesize (4) that diverging behavior concerning military interventions is reflected in diverging
reference points.
2 Methodology
Prospect Theory has been tested in experiments, using specific problem descriptions; and in empirical
studies, assuming that military interventions have one monothematic goal that can be categorized either
as a loss or as a gain frame (Nincic 1997). Such a categorization may be appropriate for military
interventions during the Cold War – however, more recent troop deployments have multiple goals or are
discussed under multiple prospects. Whereas the 1980s interventions in Central America were justified
with the danger they posed to the United States and the prospective gains that such an intervention
could yield (Perla 2011), interventions in the 1990s were motivated by humanitarian issues as well. That
other people’s suffering motivates Western governments to deploy their troops abroad reflects the
different status of military conflict after 1990 in that the rising share of intra-state conflicts cause more
civilian harm than before. Justifications for military interventions, thus, increasingly focus not on the
losses and gains for one’s own society, but also on the losses and gains of other society, e.g. in the target
country. Implicitly, the issue of regional stability has become one of the internationally accepted goals of
foreign and security policy. Therefore, the original rather narrow conception of Prospect Theory, which
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focused exclusively on personal losses and gains, has to be adjusted in that gains and losses encompass
personal as well as other society’s gains and losses as well. Consequently, political oratory points out
multiple goals when debating military interventions.
What is more, these goals have to be acceptable for many different groups within a society. Therefore,
media coverage has replaced the analysis of central speeches in order to define the prospects of an
intervention (Perla 2011). Naturally, media content is able to provide a variety of policy objectives, since
it captures mainstream, opposition and contested frames at the same time. To that end, the paper
presents a content analysis of the discourse prior to the start of each intervention in each country. It
assesses the share of gain and loss frames that were used in the media discourse about the prospects of
that intervention to see how governments explained military interventions to their home audiences.
The paper thus assumes that governmental rhetoric can be analyzed by looking at the media content,
which raises the question whether and how the media themselves shape the discussion about military
interventions. On the one hand, news media act as reporters, thereby filtering and indexing the news
(Bennett 1994; Zaller and Chiu 2000). On the other hand, the news media usually do not formulate
foreign policy preferences of their own. They may favor a specific policy option over another and thereby
shape the discourse; however, they do not develop such a position out of their own but rather adopt a
specific elite position and follow that proposition along partisan lines or promote a specific position in
order to attract their core audience. In doing so, they provide a distorted lens on events (Baum and
Groeling 2010: 187), act as interpreters in that they offer reference points on their own and tend to
overemphasize negative news.
These processes occur simultaneously and they are anticipated by all participants of the foreign policy
communication process: the decisionmakers, the news media, and the audience. According to Baum and
Potter; 2008), the media provide a foreign-policy marketplace where arguments and positions are
exchanged frequently and simultaneously. Therefore, the news media seem as an appropriate locus to
inquire about the framing of military interventions. In sum, mass media can be understood as a nonstrategic, non-intentional actor that provides biased and filtered media content, but is sufficiently broad
to measure the most important frames that shape the discourse about a military intervention. Although
there exist many electronic channels where any individual can transmit his or her view of the world,
these venues only rarely attract enough attention to shape the national foreign policy discourse. Usually,
such independent content has to appear in the mass media to attract a considerable part of the public’s
attention.
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Methodically, I resort to a selection of print and TV news: the New York Times and ABC News (transcripts
via LexisNexis) for the US, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the weekly Der Spiegel and the
Website Spiegel Online (from 2003 on) for Germany. This choice of sources encompasses the leading
newspapers of each country that have an agenda-setting function for other media and electronic outlets,
as described by the concept of intermedia-agenda-setting (Schenk 2007: 446–7). Additionally, I amended
traditional news media with TV news in the case of the US and with a renowned weekly magazine (and
later, a website) for Germany. This choice of media outlets guarantees (1) continuity over our time frame
1999-2011 and (2) captures the most prominent papers, magazines and TV news of a country.
According to Levy; 2003), the most interesting case to apply Prospect Theory occurs in a dynamic setting,
i.e. when the status quo is undefined and when reference point framing becomes part of the political
game. This is usually happening before an intervention starts. The analysis of media content aims at
capturing the moment in the framing process when most of the arguments for or against an intervention
are voiced. As a rule of thumb, therefore, the analysis includes all media coverage appearing one month
before the start of each intervention (cf. table 1). The period of one month prior to an intervention
serves best to identify those arguments that have been exchanged when the debate about an
intervention really took place. Thus, I traced media coverage for the month prior to the day after the
event took place (to include the first articles about the start of an intervention). Some exceptions were
necessary, however, because Germany and the US did not always start their interventions at the same
day.
In order to find those articles that depict arguments for or against an intervention, I applied the name of
the target country as a search term. The American news outlets usually published more articles and
reports than their German counterparts; in total three times the amount of German news outlets (2.298
vs. 742 articles/reports). To make the analysis feasible, I resorted to random sampling with the goal to
retrieve an equal number of articles from each of the news sources. The articles from quality newspapers
should be of equal quantity; and the reports or articles from ABC and Spiegel/SpiegelOnline as well. I
deem this procedure sufficiently satisfying for being representative and feasible. However, the case of
Iran proved to be more challenging than the remaining conflict, because only very few articles containing
the word “Iran” truly dealt with the international nuclear conflict. Thus, the search terms “military” and
“attack” (or “Angriff”) were added and yielded more precise articles.1 Of all articles, I only sampled the
NYT retrieval. For ABC, FAZ and Spiegel I performed a census analysis. In total for all five conflicts, I
content-analyzed 827 articles: 434 for US sources and 393 for German news sources.
1
However, the German media did not refer to any Bundeswehr intervention in Iran (see table 1).
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All articles were processed with the help of a computer-based qualitative text analysis tool (MaxQDA).
The author together with a political science postgraduate performed the content analysis between
October 2012 and January 2013.2 We first looked for passages that dealt with the intervention or nonintervention as envisioned by the nation where the media comes from. In a second step, we focused on
the arguments that went along with the mention of the planned intervention. The basic question was:
does the paragraph disclose, deny or ask for the policy objective of the military intervention or nonintervention of the nation or alliance where the news media come from? As a third step, we classified
the arguments into loss or gain frames, i.e., whether the intervention aims at preventing a loss or at
achieving a gain in the perspective of the media’s home country by focusing on verbs. Additionally, we
coded the underlying reference point by focusing on nouns. Our succinct and exclusive categories of
either gain or loss allow for precise analyses of the discourse preceding military interventions.
In order to test the hypotheses, the paper turns first to an account of public opinion data on the
respective interventions before concentrating on content analysis.
3 Approving military interventions
“War is humanity’s least subtle problem” (Mueller 2011: 675). In this quote, John Mueller formulates
that most people have an instinctive attitude that guides their opinion about a potential military conflict
although they lack detailed information about the military situation. Thus, media coverage and
overwhelming governmental rhetoric may be less prone to change peoples’ attitudes on decisions about
peace and war. Typically, public support for military interventions tends to be highest at the start of an
intervention, but shrinks in the long run. Baum and Potter explain the declining support with dynamic
information asymmetries that change over the course of a conflict (Baum and Potter 2008). At the
beginning (which is the moment that is the focus of this paper), the government has an informational
advantage: the news media and the public are highly interested in new information which results in an
increased demand in a situation of scarce supply. Such a short-term equilibrium provides the executive
with extraordinary leeway to frame and to shape the discourse about military interventions. This
freedom, however, comes at a price in that in the long run, when the media and the public are gaining
ground, consult alternative sources for information and hold the government increasingly accountable
for what they promised at the beginning of the war. Combing existing scholarship on public opinion
about military interventions which explains waning support with compassion fatigue (Moeller 1999),
2
We performed two intercoder reliability tests (for Afghanistan and Libya) and obtained reliability coefficients of
86 and 78 per cent, respectively.
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growing casualty numbers (Mueller 2005) , the lack of success (Gelpi et al. 2006) and elite dissent (Burk
1999), Baum and Potter provide an information-driven explanation for waning support of military
interventions (2008: 42).
The focus on the information equilibrium provides two insights for this study: first, that media content is
an adequate source to trace back the discourse about the goals of a military intervention, and second,
that the beginning of a military strike offers a particular period for studying approval and framing,
because words and prospects dominate the information environment. If the exchange of information on
the marketplace of foreign policy communication favors the government at the beginning of an
intervention (Baum and Potter 2008: 48–9), it follows that approval for military strikes should be highest
just before an intervention starts. Of course, such a setting assumes that the country in question does
participate in the intervention. Since there is no scholarship on the approval of non-participation in
military interventions – and rarely any polling – this paper addresses some aspects of approval for nonparticipation.
Table 1: Approval Rates at the Start of an intervention
Kosovo
Afghanistan
Iraq
Iran
Libya
50% US
63% Ger
91% USA
61% Ger
72% USA
3% Ger
13% USA
3% Ger
47% USA
64% Ger*
* Approval for non-participation
3
Sources: CBS News Poll via pollingreport.com; Politbarometer 1999 V185 (for Kosovo) ; Pew Research Center Poll Q6f1;
4
5
Politbarometer 2001 V195 (for Afghanistan) ; Pew Research Center Poll Q21f1; Politbarometer 2002 V244 (for Iraq) ;
6
Transatlantic Trends 2005 Q20 (for Iran) ; Pew Research Center Poll via pollingreport.com; Politbarometer 2011 (West) V309
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(for Libya) .
3
Question Wording: Do you favor […] the United States and NATO conducting airstrikes against Serbia? (Mar 1999);
Und finden Sie es richtig, dass sich die Bundeswehr mit Kampfflugzeugen [an den Luftangriffen der NATO in
Jugoslawien] beteiligt […]? (Apr 1999).
4
Question Wording: Do you favor […] taking military action, including the use of ground troops, to retaliate against
whoever is responsible for the terrorist attacks? (Nov 2001); Der Bundestag hat beschlossen, dass sich Deutschland
an den militärischen Aktionen der USA beteiligt, finden Sie das richtig […]? (Dec 2001).
5
Question Wording: Would you favor […] taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule? (Feb 2003);
Falls es zu Militäraktionen der USA gegen den Irak kommt, sollte sich Deutschland dann auf jeden Fall beteiligen
[…]? (Sep 2002).
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Question Wording: There are discussions on what to do in Iran to encourage it to refrain from developing nuclear
weapons. What do you think is the best way for [Europe / the U.S.] to put pressure on Iran: […] to take military
action? (Jun 2005).
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Question Wording: All things considered, do you think that the U.S. and its allies made the right decision […] to
conduct military airstrikes in Libya? (Mar 2011); Die Bundesregierung hat beschlossen, dass sich Deutschland nicht
an der Militäraktion in Libyen beteiligt. Finden Sie das richtig […]? (Mar 2011).
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Comparing five instances of military interventions across two countries shows that the approval rates
differ greatly across the spectrum of the use of military force (see Table 1). First, there is a group of
interventions that enjoys sound public support: for Germany, this is Kosovo and Afghanistan; for the US,
it is Afghanistan and Iraq. Second, there are military interventions which are barely approved and enjoy
only a thin majority: for the US, this is the Kosovo and the Libya intervention. Finally, there are those
interventions that were not realized or in which the Germany did not participate. The (scarce) polling
numbers on these cases confirm that the public approves of their governments’ decisions. The numbers
further indicate that the lack of public support may have been the main reason for refraining from an
intervention altogether. These cases are – for Germany – Iraq and Libya and – for both countries – an
attack on Iran.
4 Framing military interventions
One of the central tenets of Prospect Theory is that support for a risky decision will increase when its
prospects are framed in terms of losses. Accordingly, public support for an intervention should show
some parallels with the way in which this intervention has been framed. However, a look at the initial
approval rates for each of the five interventions and comparing them with the overall loss frame rate of
each conflict (see Table 2) does not confirm the first hypothesis. Obviously, such a rough juxtaposition of
aggregated frame categories that were collected over the course of a month with select approval rates
at the beginning of the intervention does not allow for a confirmation of the hypothesized relation
between framing and approval. Given that such a confirmation has been provided by other studies with
different research design (Nincic 1997; Perla 2011), this study does not refute the proposed relationship
but contends that punctual comparisons across several interventions are methodologically not suitable
for such a test. Rather, support for recent military is vague, dynamic and obviously not linked to the
share of loss frames that the news media reported in the month prior to the start of an intervention.
Rather, external events like 9/11 or nuclear weapons programs seem to have paved the way for
substantial public support or opposition, respectively.
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Table 2: Frames and Reference Points
Kosovo
Loss frame rate
Most frequent loss
frames
Most frequent gain
frames
Most frequent
reference point
Afghanistan
77% USA
74% Ger
77% USA
76% Ger
Destroy the
Stop violence in
Taliban (USA)
Kosovo (USA,
War on terror
Ger)
(Ger)
Achieve
Humanitarian
peaceful
mission (USA,
Solution (USA,
Ger)
Ger)
Mortal danger
Present risk of
for locals (USA, terrorism (USA,
Ger)
Ger)
Iraq
61% USA
96% Ger
Oust dangerous
Saddam (USA)
Iraq War = Adventure
(Ger)
Peace and Freedom
in Iraq (USA)
Iran
100% USA
[-] Ger*
Restrict nuclear
capabilities (USA)
[-] (Ger)
79% USA
87% Ger
Oust dangerous Gadhafi
(USA)
Prevent costly war (Ger)
Protect Civilians (USA)
[-]
Support the UN (Ger)
Dangerous Dictator
(USA)
Libya
Iran is not allowed to have
nuclear capabilities (USA)
Tradition of military
restraint (Ger)
Mortal danger for locals;
Dangerous dictator (USA)
War is risky (Ger)
[-] (Ger)
War is risky (Ger)
7 Oct 2001
20 Mar 2003
[-]
19 Mar 2011
9 Sep - 8 Oct
22 Feb - 21 Mar
2001 (USA)
2003 (USA)
Time frame of
26 Feb 1 Dec 2005 2 Mar analysis
25 Mar 1999 18 Oct - 17 Nov 24 Aug 31 Jan 2006
1 Apr 2011
2001 (Ger**)
23 Sep 2002 (Ger***)
*
No reference to a Bundeswehr intervention in the German media.
** Vote of confidence on November 16, 2001, which settled the decision to intervene in Afghanistan.
*** Decision to stay out of Iraq was made and communicated already in August 2002, which ended the debate about
Germany’s participations.
Start of intervention
24 Mar 1999
Hypothesis no. 1 thus has to be rejected. Nevertheless, the dynamics of support and framing merit a
closer examination: Prospect theory that describes how preferences diverge in view of objectively similar
alternative options, is a popular concepts and has been applied frequently in the social sciences (Levy
2003), although with diverging results (Kühberger 1998). As a consequence, several subtypes of prospect
framing emerged. Among them are risky choice framing, attribute framing and goal framing (Levin et al.
1998). For our purposes, the concept of attribute framing provides most explanatory leverage, because it
deals with the use of gain frames. Attribute framing describes rhetorical efforts at a particularly late
stage of the foreign policy cycle, when decisions are already made and the government has settled on a
firm course of action. From that moment on, the rhetoric switches towards a more advertising tone and
portrays the objectives of a military mission in positive terms. In doing so, policymakers highlight the
merits of their prospects more than the existing risks, and turn to gain frames more often than resorting
to loss frames (Levin et al. 1998: 158–67).
With regard to the remaining hypotheses, the content analysis provides some evidence that goal framing
and risky choice framing still account for most of our findings. First and foremost, the diverse goals of
military interventions still are framed in terms of losses. Between 61 and 100 per cent of all goal
descriptions correspond to that category (see Table 2), which confirms the second hypothesis. Obviously,
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a risky endeavor such as the deployment of troops abroad is discussed in terms of preventing a loss,
rather than achieving a gain. Most importantly, loss frames do prevail even when a country does not
participate in a military intervention. Obviously, discussing a non-intervention involves even more loss
framing than discussing an actual participation of one’s own troops, because the phase of attribute
framing never takes place.
Regarding the differences between Germany and the US, the different strategic cultures of both
countries do not seem to drive prospect framing of their military engagements into a specific direction –
to the contrary, the German media discourse describes the goals of an intervention more often in terms
of losses than the American discourse does. Especially the framing of German non-interventions reveals
such a pattern. Obviously, German war-refraining culture does not lead to a more gain-oriented
description of an intervention’s prospects, but rather prohibits that policymakers and the media engage
in promotive attribute framing that would serve to enhance potential achievements. In this regard, the
third hypothesis has to be rejected.
Regardless of the single dimension in which a military intervention can be framed, the common ground
that all of these descriptions are based on is provided by the underlying reference point. Labels such as
“reference point framing” (Perla 2011) emphasize the importance of the reference point. Looking at the
most frequent reference points for each conflict, the analysis reveals that these depictions of the status
quo tend to differ between Germany and the US when they diverge in their intervention behavior.
Stating the goals for an intervention in Iraq, for example, shows that American framings implied that
Saddam Hussein is a dangerous dictator, whereas German policymakers and the media showed a
consensus that war is risky, perhaps too risky. A similar pattern occurred prior to the Libya intervention.
Thus, the fourth hypothesis is confirmed. The reference points epitomize underlying norms, identities,
and assessments about the current state of affairs and therefore have the potential to influence current
perceptions more subtly than overt framing, promoting or advertising as it is recorded in the single
frame categories.
5 Conclusion
The paper showed that discussing military interventions in terms of Prospect Theory proves fruitful with
regard to the study of reference points and for the overall finding that military goals are communicated
predominantly in form of loss frames. The traditional assumption of Prospect Theory, however – that
people tend to favor risky action to prevent a loss more than to achieve a gain – could not be transferred
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to the study of military missions. Obviously, approval for or against the use of force has more sources
than just how governments and other communicators present the issues that are at stake.
Nevertheless, the study raised some areas for further research, e.g. questions about the use of gain
frames. Indeed, when the use of loss frames is largely attributed with more approval and consent by the
audience, then it remains a puzzle why policymakers would apply gain frames at all. As Prospect Theory
predicts, gain frames are less likely to be convincing when arguing in favor of risky measures. The study
of conceptual subtypes that derived from risky choice framing showed how gain frames abound once
that a decision has been taken, because as soon as such a decision has been made final, the framing of a
military intervention is changing. At that point, the discussion is no longer about making risky choices or
not, it is moreover about advertising a decision that has become irrevocable. The framing thus is no
longer about how to decide but about the characteristics of the issue at stake. The so-called attribute
framing is based on a more linear stimulus-response compatibility (Levin et al. 1998: 164), implying that
without the risky environment condition, people tend to approve more when the characteristic of an
issue is portrayed as something positive.
With regard to the nature of military interventions, it is important that the intervention decision appears
firm enough to portray it as a given fact, and that the descriptions of the mission’s goals are merely
attributes of the intervention. In that case, positive descriptions cause more consent than negative
descriptions. This shift of framing effects from the risky choices to mere attributes is a second
explanation for why a military intervention gets portrayed as achieving a gain. Hence, this paper’s
findings predict that gain frames are used most widely when decisions are fixed and framed in a way to
advertise them to the larger public.
Another reason for applying gain frames in the discourse on military interventions is that the reality of
today’s military interventions is somewhat different in comparison to traditional wars of necessity.
Today, the objective of a military intervention is framed in positive terms because the goals are put
frequently on the table as a general guideline to evaluate all policy steps from decision-making to
implementation. All people involved in such an endeavor, be it military or civilian personal, receive
frequent briefings that originate at the top-level hierarchy and that trickle down to all participants.
Therefore, a pure negative framing would inhibit motivation and commitment to the cause. The content
of these briefings will no longer go unnoticed by the broad public. In some way, be it through the mass
media or through other informants, the contents of regular briefings will enter the public discourse and
should therefore be compatible with a country’s autostereotypes. Most notably, foreign policy speeches
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usually reach multiple audiences, because modern communication potentially spreads messages to all
audiences. Thus, memos and manuscripts are increasingly crafted in a way that they not only convey
information for their intended addressees, but avoid negative externalities in case that they are
published.
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