One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

In Failing to Win, Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney illuminate the limitations of the rationalist model of “score-keeping” that seeks to relate perceptions of victory and defeat to objectively observable material gains and losses on the battlefield. They cite a number of familiar cases in international politics (the Mayaguez, Somalia, Tet, the War of 1812, etc.) where perceptions of winners and losers were instead shaped by psychological, political, and cultural factors. The authors portray states and/or decision makers as victims of “match-fixing” (a term borrowed from sports, pp. 38–39) as mind-sets, salient events, and societal pressures distort reality and produce apparent victors despite ambiguous outcomes or, even worse, turn clear winners on the battlefield into losers in the court of public opinion. Where other researchers attempt to measure individual perceptions of prospective success or elicit the metrics that form the foundation for these beliefs, Johnson and Tierney offer a comprehensive model of the process that yields these judgments. In doing so, they construct a bridge between the rationalist (score-keeping) camp and those scholars that emphasize the importance of political and/or psychological biases (match-fixing).

The book begins with the construction of the score-keeping and match-fixing frameworks. The authors emphasize that although score-keeping serves as the null hypothesis throughout the book, they accept the normative strength of this framework and “argue later that score-keeping is the way people should judge victory and defeat” (p. 24, emphasis in original). Score-keeping involves an accounting of the material gains and aims of each side in a conflict (the authors eschew counterfactual analyses to evaluate policy optimality, pp. 28–29). Both gains (and losses) and aims are then weighted for importance and difficulty (see Chart 2.2, p. 27). The match-fixing framework offers a descriptively valid alternative that supplements the rationalist model. Mind-sets, salient events, and societal pressures subjectively bias both the metrics chosen to evaluate policy and the processing of information pertinent to those metrics (altering access, selection, and recall and occasionally producing distortion, pp. 44–45). The authors argue that both score-keeping and match-fixing occur (sometimes varying among observers of the same case), but note that the decisiveness and clarity of some outcomes favor score-keeping (e.g., World War II). They also suggest that observers tend to match-fix against the more powerful side in a conflict and that democratic publics tend to score-keep others but match-fix against themselves (p. 78). The complete explanatory model (Chart 4.1, p. 78) depicts the conditional nature of score-keeping and match-fixing in forming perceptions of victory and defeat.

The remainder of the book in composed of case studies (of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Tet Offensive, Yom Kippur War, U.S. intervention in Somalia, and current U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq) and a concluding chapter offering advice for observers, international leaders, and U.S. policymakers. In each case study, the authors first provide a score-keeping analysis of the outcomes for the relevant actors that inevitably fails to predict the predominant postconflict perceptions of success and failure. They then embark on constructing a match-fixing explanation that more accurately reflects the counterintuitive judgments (at least from the rationalist perspective) of contemporary observers. An important footnote (n. 8, pp. 309–10) describes the process used to select the cases. Each case was chosen due to an a priori belief that the score-keeping framework failed to fully explain judgments about the outcomes for relevant actors. Since these cases also served as inductive referents in theory construction, they “are not meant to be a scientific test” of the authors' predictions (n. 8, p. 309). Instead, the cases may be viewed as plausibility probes of the match-fixing framework and broader comprehensive model.

As with any book of such expansive scope and interdisciplinary character, Failing to Win is vulnerable to critique from a number of perspectives. The authors' profession that the score-keeping framework is not a “straw man” argument (p. 24) may ring false for adherents of the rationalist model. After cataloguing the many match-fixing biases that humans are known to possess, the authors conclude that “[n]one of this makes Framework 1, score-keeping, a realistic model for explaining human evaluations much of the time…. T]hese predisposing factors often fix the match so that one side is bound to win, almost irrespective of its gains or losses on the ground” (pp. 48–49). This sentiment, combined with the stripped-down nature of the authors' score-keeping model and the case-selection criteria, suggests that they may be engaging in some match-fixing of their own. Conversely, political psychologists will question their stubborn attachment to score-keeping as a normative model. The frequent use of the terms “bias” and “manipulation” and the notion that leaders and states are “victims” of match-fixing perpetuates the notion that these are departures from rationality, rather than simply fundamental human behaviors. Finally, historians will find little new in the case studies as the authors rely primarily on secondary sources and emphasize breadth over depth (given the number of frameworks, variables, and actors).

Despite its limitations, the book is an ambitious and novel contribution to the burgeoning literature on the determinants of wartime public opinion. Its foremost strengths are the comprehensiveness of the overall model, the authors' willingness to acknowledge the underlying multidimensionality and complexity of the process of judgment, and the attempt to bridge the divide between the dominant camps in the ongoing debate. It will be of interest to scholars across a range of disciplines and should be required reading for leaders and policymakers who must shape opinion at home and abroad or risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.