The Armed Forces’ Role in Civil Protection and Public Opinion: A Research Note on the Evidence From Spain’s Emergency Military Unit

Does military involvement in domestic emergency response improve citizens’ perception of the armed forces? This paper examines this question using Spain’s Emergency Military Unit (UME) as a case study. By combining provincial-level information on cumulative UME interventions with public opinion survey data from the Center for Sociological Research, individuals with varying degrees of exposure to UME interventions are compared, both across provinces and over time, taking into account the non-random distribution of interventions. I find robust evidence of a positive effect of exposure to UME interventions on the perception of the Spanish armed forces. Preliminary research exploring news exposure as a key underlying mechanism is also presented.