Sensitivity to Casualties in the Battlefield
| DOI | 10.1177/2057891117725209 |
| Author | Shingo Hamanaka |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Research articles |
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2018, Vol. 3(1) 46–60
Sensitivity to Casualties in the
ª The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permission:
Battlefield: The Case of Israel
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891117725209
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Shingo Hamanaka
Ryukoku, University, Kyoto, Japan
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.
Keywords
rally effect, experimental survey, Arab-Israel conflict, bandwagon effect
The State of Israel has fought a series of wars since the last millennium. The second Lebanon War
and the Gaza War count as major conflicts in the last decade for Israeli citizens. In this era, a
democratic state—the US being an exception—rarely engages in international conflicts without
cases of international intervention. A representative democracy is assumed to be built upon the
principle of public opinion underpinning public policy. Foreign and defense policies are generally
not regarded as exceptions to this principle. When looking at the role of public opinion in foreign
and military affairs, we can find a considerable amount of research on the relationship between
American public opinion and US foreign policy (Everts and Isernia, 2001: 4). Researchers looking
into the issue of public opinion shaping foreign policy, therefore, begin their academic investiga-
tion in the context of the US.
This study examines the duration of support for the government by the Israeli people in times of
war. The rally-round-the-flag effect, or rally effect for short, proclaiming that wartime govern-
ments enjoy majority public support at the start of wars, is a challenging topic in the field of
Corresponding author:
Shingo Hamanaka, Department of Law, Ryukoku University, 67 Tsukamoto-cho Fukakusa, Kyoto, 612-8577, Japan.
Email: oshiro@law.ryukoku.ac.jp
Hamanaka
47
International Relations (IR) (Colaresi, 2007). Although this effect was noticed at the time of the
Second Lebanon War (Elran, 2007), 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:
Most (but not all) analyses of Israeli public opinion in this regard point to a highly opinionated citizenry
with a similar structure at the grassroots level. The high level of political interest should not come as a
surprise to those familiar with the context. Israel is a young society that has been engaged from its very
inception in 1948 in a continuous struggle to ensure its existence in, and acceptance by, a politically
hostile environment. Consequently, its ordinary citizens have developed a strong and ongoing interest
in the conduct of the state’s foreign policy, particularly as it affects relations with its Arab neighbors.
(Hermann and Yuchtman-Yaar, 2002: 597–598)
There are three reasons for addressing the case of Israel in this study. The first reason is the
wider perspective of the theory of public opinion in war, based on the evidence of the US case
(Baker and Oneal, 2001; Burk, 1999; Hayes and Guardino, 2011; Schwarz, 1994; Gartner and
Segura, 2000; Verba et al., 1967). This theory should explain the level of public support in Israel if
the rally phenomenon was universal. Second, Israel is not only the Zionist State, or the state for
Jews, but also a state endorsing the democratic principle that public opinion underpins public
policy. Defense is not the absolute agendum for the citizens but is rather a political issue based on
a cost-benefit calculation, or a cost minimization problem under Israeli budgetary constraints.
Third, focusing our investigation on Israel will lend further insight into the theory of the rally
effect. Social psychologists provide the foundation for the rally effect based on the concept of
social identity (Coser, 1956; Frieden et al., 2013: 137). According to Shamir and Shikaki (2002:
541), the social identity theory shows, in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, how “group-
mediated bias works to support group members’ needs to derive positive and distinct in-group
identity and to maintain group status and integrity.” Maoz and McCauley (2009: 537) obtain
empirical results from a survey indicating that Israeli Jews perceived zero-sum relations with and
were in fear of the outgroup, the Palestinians, under intergroup threat in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
When our research derives a hypothesis from the theory on the duration of the rally effect, we
have to pay attention to the fact that Israel fights to defend the country and has a purpose different
from that of the US. The social identity approach gives an intuitive understanding that Israeli
citizens might be less sensitive to the numbers of casualties—a factor in the decreasing approval
rates for the government—than the American people because of the difference in aims between
self-defense and intervention in a foreign country. The citizens are expected to be more sensitive to
national security then other nations because of the small size of their country surrounded by hostile
Arab states. Furthermore, the average education level is higher for Israelis than for Americans
(OECD, 2016). We expect that the Israeli public are rational enough to make a decision that
supports or opposes the government in responding to information. The popular aphorisms “the
whole world is against us” or “nation that dwells alone” might express the Jewish feeling of being
encircled by enemies (Hermann, 2001: 166). Education on the history of the Zionist principle and
the system of universal conscription can strongly compel citizens to internalize Jewish identity
(Arian, 2005; Furman, 1999; Levy and Sasson-Levy, 2008; Popper, 1998; Sand, 2010). It also
underpins the intuition for keeping the duration of the rally effect in Israel. However, we are
uncertain as to whether this intuition is true before an examination of the data.
48
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 3(1)
Yagil Levy, an Israeli political scientist, addresses the issue of casualty sensitivity in Israel.
Levy (2011) states that, “the legitimation of military sacrifice has declined since the 1980s, mainly
following the First Lebanon War”1 in 1982. The most recent government, Levy (2010) has said,
faced the tradeoff between casualty aversion—using excessive force with avoiding the risk of
casualties—and avoiding non-combatant fatalities; it accepted the former strategy in Israel. Casu-
alty aversion, shyness, tolerance, or sensitivity are common expressions about how casualties
affect public support (Gelpi et al., 2009: 8), and they generally play a key role in posing legal
and moral constraints and, thereby, tying the hands of democratic governments in using military
force (Levy, 2011: 78–79). Furthermore, Levy (2012) extends his argument to shape the death
hierarchy structure in Israeli society; citizens are more sensitive to the death of reservists or secular
middle-class conscripts and less so to that of residents in peripheral areas near the border with the
Gaza Strip, e.g. Sderot city. Though we are interested in the arguments for the democratic face of
Israel, Levy’s arguments depend on the documents of the Winograd Committee, the inquiry
commission into the Second Lebanon War, or secondary research materials about Israeli wars,
so there is no strong evidence in his research in this respect.
In the remainder of the article, I first lay out the theories of the rally effect and the human costs
thereof. Secondly, I delineate the rational expectation, assuming highly educated citizens, as the
mainstream foundation for explaining public attitudes, along with the bandwagon effect theory as
the alternative approach. I emphasize the advantage of the bandwagon theory to explain the
duration of the rally-round-the-flag mindset in Israel. Thirdly, I test my central hypothesis about
poll information affecting the attitudes toward the government in wartime. I examine the impor-
tance of the bandwagon effect by analyzing the consistency of the data from our experimental
survey. I conclude by discussing the external validity and implications of our findings.
Theory
The rally effect and human cost
Most scholars of international politics would point to Mueller (1973) for his seminal work on
public opinions surrounding war (Baum and Groeling, 2010; Berinsky, 2009; Berinsky and
Druckman, 2007; Brody, 1991; Gartner and Segura, 1998; Gelpi et al., 2006, 2009). The rally-
round-the-flag effect denotes the phenomenon of increasing popular support by citizens for their
country’s government when the country is involved in an international crisis or war. It comes from
the first systematic explanation by...
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