Economic decline won’t cause war -- diversionary theory is wrong

The diversionary theory of war is one of the best-known conflict initiation theories focusing on democratic leaders’ incentives. According to the theory, democratic leaders who face greater electoral challenges, either due to political scandals or an economic downturn, are more likely to choose provocative foreign policies and seek to lead the country into diplomatic crises, in hopes of inciting nationalistic sentiments that will boost their approval ratings via the so-called “rally around the flag” effect (e.g. Gaines Citation2002; Hetherington and Nelson Citation2003; Mueller Citation1973).

Despite the intuitive appeal of this theory, empirical studies have been largely unable to find consistent evidence to corroborate the purported theoretical mechanisms. Findings from observational studies have been quite mixed. The fact that a diverse set of findings have been reported from observational studies suggests that unobservable confounders arising from strategic interactions greatly hinder our ability to tease out the causal effect of electoral hardship on conflict behaviors.

In this research note, we claim that the key assumption of the theory does not work as expected. That is, a political leader cannot divert attention from his/her political scandals by emphasizing a foreign threat and alerting the general public that the country may go to war against an enemy. Although the assumptions that the threat or use of force is salient and that an acute enemy threat would create a rally-around-the-flag effect are common, they have rarely been tested at a micro-level in an experimental setting. Our team conducted a cross-national experiment to find out whether and how political leaders could divert the public’s attention away from their political scandals.

We selected Japan and Israel as fields of the experiment. Both are comparable parliamentary democracies that have witnessed a series of serious political scandals. Moreover, the general Japanese and Israeli public could plausibly expect a hawkish national security policy against the potentially nuclear-armed enemy states of North Korea and Iran, respectively, both of which are widely represented as “evil” and “mad” enemies.Footnote1 While we acknowledge that Japan and Israel have significantly different military cultures and distinct records of militarized interstate disputes, we consider them to be interesting, important, and comparable cases that could generate significant findings in testing the above-mentioned assumptions of diversionary war theory.

Our contribution is twofold. First, we confirm that, in both Japan and Israel, diverting public attention from salient political scandals would fail even if a political leader emphasizes the enemy threat or alerts the public to potential escalatory moves against the enemy. In particular, the most escalatory hawkish policy—a preemptive move—would not help the government hide its political scandals from the general public. Second, we found that, when we showed a (mock) news article predicting the prime minister’s hawkish policy (i.e. an escalation against a potentially nuclear-armed enemy), this would not directly lead to greater support for the prime minister compared to the mere emphasis on the threat level posed by the enemy. Just warning of an imminent threat from North Korea or Iran proves critical and sufficient to induce political support from the general public; we call this threat-induced political support.