A bear in the woods? Threat framing and the marketplace of values

To many scholars, the Bush administration's ability to convince a majority of the public to favor war with Iraq represents a dangerous failure of the marketplace of ideas. A healthy marketplace, they argue, would have produced a more robust debate over the administration's justifications for war, revealing their weakness. In this paper I argue that these scholars have based their arguments on a poorly specified model of the marketplace of ideas and that Iraq does not represent a failure of the marketplace. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the strength of the marketplace lies not in its ability to move the nation toward truth via debate and deliberation, but in its tendency to divide the public into countervailing factions based on competing sets of values and competing frames of the issues at hand. I develop this argument first by elaborating a model of the "marketplace of values" and redefining threat inflation as a process of efforts to frame security issues for the public. I test my model first against public opinion data regarding American threat perceptions and then use it to explain the Bush administration's successes and failures in building and maintaining public support for the war in Iraq.