The Oxygen of Publicity: Explaining U.S. Media Coverage of International Kidnapping

What explains U.S. media coverage of Americans kidnapped abroad? While some hostages receive national media attention, others hardly make the local news. Using an original, event count dataset of newspaper stories about Americans kidnapped abroad since 2001, this article tests the oft-cited, under-measured assumption that “terrorism” receives more media attention than other violence. Controlling for variation across kidnapping, I show that those framed as “terrorism” receive more coverage. Challenging existing literature, I also demonstrate that incidents with more victims receive less coverage than those incidents with fewer victims, and that there is no “missing white woman syndrome” in international kidnapping.

Published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol 46, No. 5 (2023): 618-639.
Paper available here | PDF available here | Online appendix available here | Dataset available here | Codebook available here.

Who Supports Hostage Recovery? Explaining Individual Variation in American Support for Bringing Hostages Home (with Lauren Prather)

What explains public opinion on government responses to hostage crises? Existing research has explored how incident-level factors shape public opinion of hostage recovery, but we know less about which Americans support recovery—and why. In this article, we explore how individual-level factors shape public support for bringing captives home. We argue that support for hostage recovery reflects two different—and sometimes contradictory—attitudes: respondents’ general views about foreign policy, and their partisanship. Drawing on two large, nationally representative surveys of the American public, we show how Americans’ partisanship and broader foreign policy attitudes predict willingness to support a range of hostage recovery activities, including negotiations, ransom payment, and military rescue missions. We find that foreign policy internationalists are much more likely to support recovery compared to isolationists. And while broad, bipartisan majorities support recovery efforts, Republicans are significantly less supportive of making concessions to bring captive Americans home. This paper explores the domestic politics of international threat, revealing the individual determinants of support for recovery.

Published online first in the European Journal of International Security.
Paper available here | PDF available here.

​​Blaming the Victim: Hostage Deservingness and the Politics of Hostage Recovery (with Lauren Prather, revise & resubmit)

Hostage taking is a thorny problem for foreign policy and international security. Around the world, thousands of people are kidnapped every year, calling into question their governments’ ability to protect them. Such hostage crises put leaders in a terrible bind: leaders may refuse hostage takers’ demands and suffer the political consequences of sacrificing victims’ lives; or they may risk blood and treasure to recover captives, facing backlash for failure or "bad" deals. Despite this pervasive dilemma, limited scholarship has explored hostage taking and the politics thereof. This article explores the political dynamics of hostage recovery. We argue that the public sees hostage recovery as government assistance that some--but not all--victims deserve. When hostages’ circumstances of capture suggest that they were personally responsible for putting themselves in danger, the public will be less likely to support government efforts to bring them home--especially when recovery is costly. We test our theory using an experiment embedded in a large national survey of Americans and 22 interviews with senior hostage recovery personnel. Across our tests, we find robust evidence that beliefs about deservingness and cost shape public opinion on hostage recovery. Moreover, policymakers are similarly susceptible to notions of deservingness, which affects the recovery process, from  internal debate among policymakers to public messaging.