Loyalty or Accountability? Public Attitudes to Holding Soldiers Accountable for the Murder and Abuse of Civilians

How does the public view holding soldiers accountable for murdering and abusing civilians? We examine how the public trade off holding a conational perpetrator accountable for wrongdoing against national loyalty. We use survey experiments in the United States and United Kingdom to investigate how the public balances accountability and loyalty. Political theorists have identified the problem of reconciling “cosmopolitanism” and national loyalty. We investigate it empirically. Our findings suggest that while there is public commitment to accountability, it is conditional on the identity of the perpetrator. The findings are nuanced in theoretically important ways by (a) the substance of the violation and the perceived motives of the perpetrator and (b) the public position taken by specific leaders, which we demonstrate using the timing of the 2020 US election to vary leaders as well as messages in the experiments.