Once Bitten Twice Shy: How War Can Shape Soldiers’ Support for Incumbents

• In Event: Elections, Conflict, and Violence

Abstract

Does the experience of interstate war affect soldiers' support for the incumbent who sent them to the battlefield? We develop a theory of experiential retrospective voting, and argue that participation in war allows soldiers to assess the incumbent's quality and performance by observing first-hand how the incumbent managed a war. We test our theory by analyzing almost 50 years of Israeli National Election Surveys. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we demonstrate that participation in the Yom Kippur War had a durable and sizable impact on Israelis support for the incumbent Labor party. Compared with respondents who were too young to participate in the war, respondents just old enough to participate in the war report over a tenth of a standard deviation decrease in support for the incumbent labor party, well after the war has ended. We demonstrate that reduced support for the incumbent party is likely driven by soldiers preferences for security and unwillingness to support a party associated with military incompetence, and not by mechanisms relating to soldiers' ideological change or personal suffering. We further show that participation in wars where incumbents do not reveal incompetence, does not shape soldiers political preferences. Our findings suggest that wars can have durables effects on soldiers' political preferences when incumbents mismanage the war effort.

Authors

• Anna Getmansky, London School of Economics

• Chagai Weiss, University of Wisconsin - Madison