Sensitivity to Casualties in the Battlefield

Abstract

This study examines how long the Israeli people support the government for an ongoing war. The rally-round-the-flag phenomenon, proclaiming that wartime governments can enjoy majority public support at the beginning of wars, is a challenging topic in the field of International Relations. Although this effect was noticed at the time of the Second Lebanon War, it remains unclear which particular condition determined the duration of public support in Israel. While the rally effect is a universal phenomenon, it is important to keep in mind the particularity of Israel. We hold on to an alternative theory, bandwagon effect, emphasizing the role of affectivity of individuals on the flow of information in crisis, in place of the standard rational expectation theory. An original experimental survey was conducted to examine the bandwagon effect in the rally phenomenon among Israeli citizens.

Public support for the use of force in non-Western and non-major powers: The case of a China–Taiwan war

“…The first argues that they should be casualty phobic. For example, surveying citizens in Israel, Hamanaka (2018) finds that simply mentioning the term ‘many casualties’ dramatically decreased their support for an ongoing conflict with Hamas. Similarly, mentioning casualties to citizens in Japan led to an increase in support for withdrawing the Self-Defense Forces (Komiya 2019).…”

The ground operation sent citizens into a frenzy: the rally around the flag effect during operation protective edge

“…As mentioned above, studies on the rally effect are not limited to the United States, and there have been several studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study (Canetti et al, 2017(Canetti et al, , 2018Gvirsman et al, 2016;Halperin et al, 2013;Hamanaka, 2018;Zipris et al, 2019). However, most of these studies were based on laboratory surveys or survey experiments and did not include analysed polling data conducted during the ongoing war.…”

“…This phenomenon, referred to as the rally around the flag effect or rally effect, begs the question of why the majority of a country's citizens support a government's 'seemingly irrational' decisions to start wars. Research on the effects of rallying around the flag has accumulated primarily in the United States, but in recent years, research from the United Kingdom, (Feinstein, 2018;Lai & Reiter, 2005) Israel, (Hamanaka, 2018) and Japan (Kobayashi & Katagiri, 2018) has emerged. This is unsurprising, as the rally around the flag effect is not a phenomenon unique to the United States -a country that occupies a unique position in contemporary international politics -but is a universal phenomenon.…”