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Abstract

In this research article, we provide empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are substantial elite-public gaps in attitudes toward the military use of nuclear and chemical weapons. We designed and preregistered an original survey investigating support for nuclear and chemical strikes in a hypothetical scenario and fielded it to representative samples of British citizens and parliamentarians. Our results provide strong empirical support for the elite-public gap hypothesis, with the parliamentarians expressing a significantly stronger aversion to nuclear and chemical use than the public respondents. These findings contribute to contemporary scholarly debates on the nature and strength of nuclear and chemical weapon “taboos” in world politics.

Keywords

Nuclear taboo chemical taboo public opinion elite survey survey experiment foreign policy attitudes

Survey experiments conducted on population samples usually find that public attitudes toward nuclear and chemical strikes do not align with the idea of categorical nuclear and chemical “taboos” (Allison et al., 2022; Bowen et al., 2022; Dill et al., 2022; Horschig, 2022; Koch and Wells, 2021; Press et al., 2013; Rathbun and Stein, 2020; Sagan and Valentino, 2017; Schwartz, 2024b; Smetana and Vranka, 2021; Smetana et al., 2022; Sukin, 2020). Some scholars recently suggested that the aversion to these weapons could be considerably stronger among high-level elite decision-makers (Smetana and Wunderlich, 2021, 1077; Tannenwald, 2021, 1080; Smetana and Onderco, 2022). However, we still lack empirical studies directly comparing public and elite preferences in situations when the military use of nuclear and chemical weapons provides strategic benefits.

In this research article, we present the findings of our preregistered survey investigating attitudes toward the use of nuclear and chemical weapons among British citizens and parliamentarians. The United Kingdom represents a particularly hard test for the claim about an “elite aversion” toward nuclear use, given that British elites are otherwise more supportive of maintaining and modernizing the country’s nuclear arsenal than the British public (Thomson 2018). Our results nevertheless provide strong empirical support for the elite-public gap hypothesis: the elite participants in our study were considerably less likely to support nuclear or chemical strikes against a valuable terrorist target than the participants in the public sample. The effect was statistically significant and substantively large even when controlling for selected sociodemographic differences between the two samples. In the following sections, we formulate our hypotheses, introduce the survey design, present the results, and discuss the contribution of our findings.

Hypotheses

Why should political elites be more averse to the use of nuclear and chemical weapons than the general public? One argument suggests that elite decision-makers are more likely to adopt the international standards of appropriateness due to the exposure to political, diplomatic, and NGO arguments about the principled wrongness of nuclear and chemical use (Smetana and Wunderlich, 2021, 1077). As a result, the stigma and moral opprobrium attached to nuclear and chemical weapons (Bentley, 2022; Shamai, 2015; Smetana, 2020; Tannenwald, 2005) should be perceived differently by politicians and their voters.

Furthermore, political elites are generally more knowledgeable of international law and the strategic, legal, and political ramifications of using nuclear and chemical weapons. It is also conceivable that the hypothesized elite-public gap widened after the Cold War when the threat of a nuclear war lost salience in the public debate. For example, Tannenwald (2021, 1080) suggests that the fading memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki progressively weakened the public aversion to nuclear use, and “the taboo may be increasingly an elite phenomenon.”

There is some limited empirical evidence to support the claim about elite-public gaps with respect to nuclear weapons. A recent survey found that German parliamentarians were less likely to find the use of nuclear weapons against Russia legitimate than the German public (Smetana and Onderco, 2022). However, as the authors themselves note, there are significant limits to the generalizability of these findings to nuclear-armed countries such as the United Kingdom. Germany is a non-nuclear-weapon state with a long antinuclear tradition that resonates particularly among the current political elites (Onderco and Smetana, 2021, 631–632). Furthermore, the German respondents did not face the dilemma of approving nuclear strikes in a situation where using them would provide clear strategic benefits, which is the key component of survey-based studies of the “nuclear taboo” (Dill et al., 2022; Press et al., 2013).

Building on our theoretical expectations about elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes, we preregistered the following hypotheses:

H_1.1: Political elites are more averse to the military use of nuclear weapons than the public.

H_1.2: Political elites are more averse to the military use of chemical weapons than the public.

Research design

To investigate the elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes, we fielded a population survey to a representative sample of British citizens and a paired elite survey to a representative sample of the members of the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the British parliament.¹ We preregistered our study prior to fielding the elite survey in December 2023 with the Open Science Framework (OSF).²

The participants in both elite and public samples were randomly assigned one of two versions of a vignette describing a fictional scenario in which a coalition of NATO countries considered a military strike to eliminate a prominent terrorist target in Libya. Our scenario was designed to include the main features of the mock news story recently used in the cross-national population survey experiment by Dill et al. (2022): the terrorist group set up a base to produce chemical weapons and was in the process of planning a major chemical attack against civilian targets in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 3,000 fatalities if the attack would be carried out successfully.

After reading the scenario, the participants indicated which of the two military options they thought NATO countries should take in this situation. In the “nuclear strike treatment,” the participants selected between a large conventional airstrike with a 45% probability of eliminating the terrorist threat and a single nuclear weapon with a 90% probability of eliminating it. In the “chemical strike treatment,” the choice was between a large conventional airstrike with a 45% probability of eliminating the terrorist threat and an airstrike using chemical weapons with a 90% probability of eliminating it. These probability estimates correspond to “Condition 2” in Dill et al. (2022). We have not included the corresponding “Condition 1” where the nuclear strike had the same success probability as the conventional strike (90%–90%) since it has been already well established that only a very small proportion of the public prefers a nuclear strike option under this scenario (12% on average cross-nationally and merely 5.6% in the British sample in Dill et al. (2022) and the floor effect would likely prevent us from being able to identify a statistically recognizable elite-public gap.³ The 90%–45% condition is arguably critical for understanding the extent of the categorical, bright-line opposition to the military use of nuclear and chemical weapons since it introduces a potentially difficult dilemma of either violating the international “taboo” or foregoing very substantial strategic benefits of the given unconventional strike, a decision that can potentially result in a high number of civilian casualties on “our” side.

As in the experiment by Dill et al. (2022), we kept the expected collateral damage likely to be caused by any of these strikes constant at 2,700 civilian fatalities. This approach has been well established in the experimental literature on nuclear (non-)use attitudes as it allows the experimenter to isolate the effect of the categorical, normative prohibition with respect to the given unconventional weapon rather than seeing the participants rejecting nuclear or chemical use simply because they expect that many more civilians would die this way (Press et al., 2013; Smetana and Vranka, 2021). At the same time, it is fair to acknowledge that the internal validity of these studies comes with a trade-off in terms of realism. For a nuclear strike, these numbers are generally very low and would only be realistic in locations with very low population density, where conventional or even chemical strikes would unlikely produce comparable effects. On the other hand, earlier studies that experimentally varied the number of expected civilian fatalities for nuclear, chemical, and conventional strikes found that although the public correctly views nuclear weapons as intrinsically more destructive, the effects related to public approval of the use of these weapon held across conditions with varying numbers of expected civilian fatalities and the relative lack of realism in selected conditions did not seem to impact the overall results in any significant way (Smetana et al., 2022).

To ensure that the participants do not complete the survey with a false impression that nuclear weapons are generally connected with such low casualty estimates, we stressed that the terrorist base had been set up in a “remote Libyan town.” Furthermore, we concluded the public survey with a debriefing to counteract the possible conditioning effects of our study on the general public (Carpenter et al., 2021).

Our survey design also included questions about the gender and voting preference/party affiliation of our participants. We would use the responses to these items as control variables in the statistical analyses to ensure that the hypothesized elite-public gap was not merely a consequence of the different sociodemographic composition of the two samples (Kertzer, 2022).

Finally, we included a simple manipulation check to test the attentiveness of the participants in the public sample. Following the recommendation of Aronow et al. (2019), we would not drop the subjects who fail the manipulation check from the main analyses, but we would conduct paired analyses without them as a robustness check.

Results

The public survey was administered by a polling company, IPSOS, to a representative sample of the British population between September 25 and October 5, 2023. The elite survey was fielded to a representative sample of British parliamentarians via a YouGov monthly omnibus between December 1 and 19, 2023.⁴ Altogether, 1001 participants in the public sample and 105 in the elite sample completed the online survey.⁵

After consolidating a single dataset, we conducted a logistic regression analysis separately for each treatment group. We used the distinction between public and elite participants as a binary predictor, gender and partisanship as covariates, and the preferred type of strike as a binary outcome measure.

Figure 1 shows the predicted probabilities of selecting either the nuclear or chemical strike over the conventional option based on the results of two logistic regression models. The elite-public gap was statistically significant and substantively large in both nuclear (OR = .31, p = .003) and chemical (OR = 0.19, p < .001) treatments.⁶ In other words, we found that the elites were markedly less inclined than the public to opt for the “unconventional strike” option in a situation when the use of nuclear or chemical weapons was expected to provide a very substantial strategic benefit. As such, we gained empirical support for H_1.1 that political elites are more averse to the military use of nuclear weapons than the public, and for H_1.2 that political elites are more averse to the military use of chemical weapons than the public.⁷

Figure 1.

Public-elite gaps in support for the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. Predicted probabilities of selecting nuclear or chemical strike over the conventional option under respective treatments based on the results of two logistic regression models. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals. Nuclear strike treatment: n = 550 and chemical strike treatment: n = 546. See Appendix 4, Models 2–3, for the full regression table.

As a robustness check, we repeated the analyses only with participants who passed the manipulation check (n = 779). The effects remained statistically significant and substantively large after we dropped the subjects from the dataset.⁸

Discussion and conclusion

Our findings constitute strong empirical evidence of an elite-public gap in support for the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. The effect we found was statistically significant and substantively large, with approximately a 30 percent-point difference in support for the military employment of these unconventional weapons between the samples of British citizens and parliamentarians.

We suggest that our study represented a particularly hard empirical test for the elite-public gap hypothesis. For example, Thomson (2018) found that British elites are otherwise more supportive of keeping the country’s nuclear arsenal than the British public. Many other studies contend that British politicians often need to actively persuade the more skeptical voters about the need to maintain and modernize the British nuclear arsenal (Beaumont, 2021; Byrom, 2007; Clements and Thomson, 2022; Ritchie, 2013). The fact that the British voters are more ambivalent about the wisdom of maintaining an independent British nuclear arsenal and simultaneously more supportive of nuclear use than their political representatives gives further credence to the general claim about the specific “elite aversion” to nuclear use. These findings are also well aligned with the earlier claim that norms against nuclear possession and use are two different social constructs and that one does not necessarily follow the other (Walker, 2010).

Our study represents an important complement to the extensive literature on public attitudes toward nuclear and chemical use (Allison et al., 2022; Bowen et al., 2022; Carpenter and Montgomery, 2020; Dill et al., 2022; Egel and Hines, 2021; Horschig, 2022; Koch, 2023; Koch and Wells, 2021; Press et al., 2013; Rathbun and Stein, 2020; Sagan and Valentino, 2017; Schwartz, 2024b; Smetana and Onderco, 2023; Smetana and Vranka, 2021; Smetana, Vranka and Rosendorf, 2022, 2023; Sukin, 2020). While we are convinced that there are many relevant reasons for investigating public opinion in the area of foreign and security policy, our research shows that when it comes to nuclear and chemical weapons, we cannot simply assume that the views of the general public align with those of elite decision-makers, who are ultimately responsible for making decisions on the use of force. Although Kertzer (2022) has convincingly demonstrated that many alleged elite-public gaps in political behavior are overstated, he also contends that they tend to be larger in studies on international security, where the domain-specific expertise often proves to be particularly relevant. As such, despite the practical difficulties with access to reasonably sized samples of political elites (Dietrich et al., 2021; Hafner-Burton et al., 2013), using them for surveys and survey experiments in the area of “hard security” could yield substantial benefits and potentially address some of the persistent concerns about the external validity of studies investigating mass public attitudes (Kertzer and Renshon, 2022).

Ultimately, we demonstrated that in contrast to public opinion, elite preferences are more aligned with the idea of powerful nuclear and chemical nonuse norms. To this end, our study represents a balanced response to the contemporary narrative that the nuclear taboo is merely a “myth” (Schwartz, 2024a): even though the support for nuclear use among the general public is fairly high, high-level political elites seem to express attitudes that are generally consistent with the notion of a nuclear and chemical taboo (Price and Tannenwald, 1996; Tannenwald, 2007). However, we need more studies to investigate whether elite aversion is based on disgust and other visceral emotions that are associated with the taboos in world politics (Bentley, 2022) or whether this increased disapproval is merely a function of a higher elite sensitivity to reputation costs (Paul, 2009; Press et al., 2013).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes: New evidence from a survey of British parliamentarians and citizens

Supplemental Material for Elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes: New evidence from a survey of British parliamentarians and citizens by Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, Ondrej Rosendorf in Research & Politics

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Elite-public gaps in support for nuclear and chemical strikes: New evidence from a survey of British parliamentarians and citizens

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Charles University,grants PRIMUS/22/HUM/005 (Experimental Lab for International Security Studies / ELISS) and UNCE 24/SSH/018 (Peace Research Center Prague II),and by the Stanton Foundation,2022 Nuclear Security Grant,(project Public Support for Nuclear Arms Control: An Experimental Survey Approach).

Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant

This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

ORCID iD

Michal Smetana

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

The replication files are available at:

Notes

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