Prospect Theory provides a fruitful ground to analyze the political rhetoric around military interventions. It distinguishes between arguments in which decision-makers promise to achieve a gain by using military force on the one hand or to prevent a loss on the other hand. Prospect Theory further focuses on rhetorically established reference points and thus opens a way to combine Foreign Policy Analysis with concepts like framing that are borrowed from Communications. Such a combination channels the widely used framing concept into succinct loss or gain categories and allows for a more focused look on the rhetoric during wars. Moreover, it permits a comparative approach across countries, administrations and decisions for or against military interventions.
My paper compares the German and American governmental rhetoric before and during military interventions since 1999. It asks for the dominant frame and the politically established reference points for (joint) military interventions and non-interventions: To what degree do both countries differ in their argumentation? Do decisionmakers' frames reflect diverging or converging norms and interests? What reference points do decisionmakers establish? Since it is assumed that the framing of an intervention is part of the intervention decision itself, the framing process is crucial for achieving domestic support, for establishing public expectations and for credibly committing a governmental decision to public scrutiny. In detail, I focus on different frame authors of the intervention discourse in order to distinguish whether domestic opposition resorts to different ways of framing military interventions than incumbents. Finally, I shed light on the reference points in order to see if, when, and at what points in time reference point framing changes. I perform a media content analysis of interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and potentially Iran and use data from Transatlantic Trends, Politbarometer and CBS/New York Times Poll to support my findings.
