War propaganda without misinformation? Normative framing and side-taking in war
2026-07-25
How do citizens of third-party states form sympathies in foreign wars? Most prior work on wartime public opinion focuses on the effects of information: material costs, elite assessments, and characteristics of combatants. Yet wartime coverage must also make choices about how to frame a conflict, separate from endorsements or facts. For example, a military intervention might be introduced in the context of one state’s sovereignty or the other state’s quest to restore democracy, even holding the facts constant. We argue that these normative frames have a large impact on public sympathy and support, especially in third-party publics, for whom material costs may be secondary considerations and loyalties may be open to debate. We demonstrate these effects with two vignette experiments among a representative sample of 1200 American adults. Framing decisions swayed respondents’ moral judgments and sympathy by 40–65 percentage points, and support for military aid by 20–30 percentage points. These effects were large and consistent regardless of the characteristics of warring parties, respondents’ foreign policy views, or their attitudes on current events such as the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.