The Balance of Blood: Casualty ratios and the public's threshold for war

This project is a follow-up to “The Power to Hurt and Public Support for War.”

How do voters weigh enemy casualties against the costs suffered by their own forces? Prior research has almost exclusively focused on friendly casualties. We propose a theory of casualty “indifference points”—thresholds at which individuals switch from supporting to opposing continued engagement, based on the casualty ratio between enemy and friendly losses. To estimate these thresholds, we field a two-stage adaptive survey experiment. This method efficiently identifies respondents’ switching points through an individualized sequence, recovering latent thresholds over an unbounded space. We also probe respondents’ beliefs about who is winning the war at their estimated indifference point, enabling us to explore whether support collapses primarily at perceived stalemates or under conditions of strategic disadvantage. This offers a novel way to distinguish between instrumental support—conditioned on expectations of success—and resolute support—motivated by deeper normative or strategic commitments. Our study provides both a new conceptual framework for understanding battlefield trade-offs and an empirical method for estimating individual-level thresholds generalizable to other domains. The approach advances debates over democratic constraint, wartime public opinion, and the limits of cost tolerance in international conflict.