Costly Calculations

Scott Sigmund Gartner is the Provost and Academic Dean of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California having previously served as Director of the Penn State School of International Affairs. His publications include Strategic Assessment in War (1999), The Historical Statistics of the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and articles in the American Political Science Review, American  Sociological Review, and other leading journals. His honors include the Jefferson award for the best government resource. Gary M. Segura, Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, is a past president of both the Western and Midwest Political Science Associations. He was coinvestigator of the American National Election Studies (2009–15). In 2010, Segura was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 1. Introduction; 2. A price theory of war; 3. Calculating war's price: what's it worth, and how much will it cost?; 4. The price theory of war in action: experimental demonstrations of the impacts of expected costs and valuable war aims; 5. Conflict dynamics across space and time: public opinion in the Korea and Vietnam wars; 6. Getting wartime information from over-there to over-here: news media and social networks; 7. Elite opinion formation and its electoral consequences; 8. Conclusion: wars, casualties, politics and policies.

'Gary Segura and Scott Gartner in this landmark work build on decades of careful empirical research to address one of the most important topics in the study of the politics of war, how casualties affect public support for war. Costly Calculations is a monumental accomplishment that will shape the scholarly agenda for years to come.' Dan Reiter, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science, Emory University