More than words? “Genocide,” Holocaust analogies, and public opinion in the United States

ABSTRACT

In recent years, most instances of humanitarian crises involving the large-scale killing of civilians have sparked debates regarding whether the event qualifies as genocide or can be justifiably compared to the Holocaust. These seemingly semantic arguments arise because both sides in the naming debate believe that the use of the word genocide or analogies to the Holocaust exert a powerful framing effect on public opinion and, ultimately, important policy decisions. Yet, virtually no evidence exists to demonstrate whether these words do, in fact, wield such power. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this question utilizing a controlled survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of American citizens. By systematically varying the terms used to describe a violent conflict, we isolate the effect of these terms on Americans' perceptions of the event. We find little evidence to support the consensus that the mere use of the word genocide or the Holocaust analogy exerts a powerful influence over public opinion. Labeling a violent event “genocide” or equating it explicitly to the Holocaust does not induce the public to become significantly more supportive of intervention, nor does it significantly alter moral judgments about the victims or the perpetrators.

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Corrigendum

Notes

1. For further commentary on the debate regarding the Holocaust analogy in Syria, see Bovy (2015) and Kristof (2015).

2. A possible exception is the post 9–11 debate over the word “terrorism.”

3. For a review of this literature, see Chong and Druckman (2007).

4. Mamdani also argues that labeling a conflict genocide also tends to “racialize the conflict,” portraying it as an effort to exterminate an ethnic group solely because of racial differences.

5. Charles Krauthammer (1999) makes a similar argument about American intervention in Kosovo.

6. See Novick (1999: 247–257) for further examples of the use of the Holocaust analogy by proponents of humanitarian intervention.

7. This hypothesis, of course, is simply the null hypothesis for Hypotheses 2a and 2b and 3a and 3b.

8. All the results presented in this article are weighted, using survey weights provided by YouGov.

9. Interviews were conducted from October 22–28, 2009.

10. This survey had a 94 percent chance of detecting a difference of means greater than or equal to 0.5 on a 6-point scale.

11. As we discuss below, however, the genocide and Holocaust frames also had no effect on relatively low-cost responses such as freezing trade with the DRC or the willingness to call the perpetrators of the violence in DRC evil.

12. The number of subjects saying the violence in Congo “probably” should be compared to the Holocaust also increased by 10 percent, but this difference was significant only at the .1 level.

13. The results in the figure are sorted from left to right in decreasing order of support/agreement.

14. The mean absolute difference between the control and the genocide conditions was 0.23. The mean absolute difference between the control and the Holocaust conditions was 0.14.

15. Indeed, over 70 percent of subjects agreed that an event should “be called ‘genocide’ if a government tries to kill large numbers of innocent civilians from a particular racial group in the effort to defeat an armed rebellion by some members of that racial group.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin A. Valentino

Notes on contributors

Benjamin A. Valentino is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

Ethan M. Weinberg

Ethan M. Weinberg is an Associate at Ropes and Gray LLC in New York City and a graduate of the Dartmouth College Class of 2012.