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Did Georgian Voters Desire Military Escalation in 2008? Experiments and Observations

In a foreign policy crisis between a strong and weak state, do citizens of the weaker party punish or reward a leader that escalates the crisis? Strong evidence suggests that there were electoral incentives for Georgian escalation in its August 2008 war with Russia. This article combines data from survey experiments, conducted on Georgian voters just weeks prior to the August 2008 war, with open-ended survey response questions from a survey fielded just weeks after the war. Respondents evaluated their leader’s crisis behavior in the aftermath of a real war differently than the evidence from pre-war survey experiments would have suggested. The divergence in findings is demonstrated by providing evidence of three empirical phenomena: a “Rally ’Round the Flag” effect, a “Fog of War” effect, and systematic differences in evaluations of leader performance depending on respondents’ proximity to actual violence.