When Congress changed its mind on Iraq — and how it explained itself
A member-by-member database of the 2007 Iraq votes, plus work on why insurgencies win and how the public judges war.
In the spring of 2007, as the Iraq War and the surge dominated the headlines, members of Congress had to vote — and then vote again. My flagship project builds a member-by-member database of everyone who voted in both March and May 2007, isolating the legislators who flipped, and reading what they actually said when they did.
The question is not just who changed position, but what language made a change defensible at home. Coding floor speeches, press releases, and public statements for troop-protection framing — “protecting our troops,” “be there for our troops” — shows how concern for service members became the public language of a shifting war vote.
That project sits inside a broader agenda: when insurgencies win, draw, or lose; how public opinion constrains wartime leaders; and how democratic politics shapes the conduct and ending of war.
The research program
The 2007 Iraq Vote-Flipping Project
Why did members of Congress change their votes on Iraq between March and May 2007 — and what did they say to justify it?
- Database of 533 members who voted in both months
- 120 Aye-to-Aye flippers: 81 House, 39 Senate
- Statements coded 1 for any troop-protection language, 0 for a statement with none, blank where no statement was found
- House May statements drawn from the Iraq-specific vote
Explore the interactive vote map (password required) →
When Do Insurgencies Win?
Work with Jason Lyall’s Correlates of Insurgency dataset — 286 insurgencies from 1800 to 2005 — examining Win / Draw / Loss outcomes from the incumbent government’s viewpoint.
- What separates incumbent wins from draws and losses?
- How do state capacity, terrain, and external support travel across two centuries of cases?
- Replication materials include the codebook held inside the dataset’s replication archive
Public Opinion & War
How citizens judge wars they are not fighting — and how leaders read those judgments. This beat connects survey attitudes, elite messaging, and the troop-protection frame that recurs from 2007 debates to today.
- Elite framing and mass response in wartime
- “Support the troops” as a cross-partisan public language
- Implications for polling, messaging, and policy communication