Presidents, Politics, and Military Strategy: Electoral Constraints during the Iraq War

Abstract

How do electoral politics affect presidential decisionmaking in war? As both commander in chief and elected officeholder, presidents must inevitably balance competing objectives of the national interest and political survival when assessing alternative military strategies in war. Yet, how and when electoral pressures influence decisionmaking during an ongoing conflict remains unclear. Drawn from the logic of democratic accountability, two mechanisms of constraint may be inferred. First, presidents may delay making decisions that are perceived to carry excessive electoral risk. Second, electoral pressures may have a dampening effect, causing presidents to water down politically sensitive courses of action to minimize any expected backlash. Recently declassified documents and interviews with senior administration officials and military figures illustrate these mechanisms in a case study of decisionmaking during the second half of the Iraq War. Both George W. Bush's surge decision of 2007 and Barack Obama's decision to withdraw troops in 2011 are shown to have been profoundly influenced by concerns related to the domestic political calendar. These findings call for further study of the nuanced ways in which the electoral cycle shapes wartime decisionmaking.

Polarization, casualty sensitivity, and military operations: evidence from a survey experiment

“…Indeed, Gelpi et al ( 2009 ) find that 2004 votes shares for Bush and Kerry were strongly correlated with judgements about whether the decision to go to war in Iraq was the “right” one. These electoral consequences have a constraining effect; we observe that democratic leaders will alter foreign policy—and even military operations on the battlefield—in the lead up to elections in order to gain more public support (Marinov et al 2015 ; Payne 2020 ; Lee 2015 ).…”

Barack Obama and the Politics of Military Force, 2009–2012

“…In the most detailed, theoretically specified work on the domestic political drivers of this decision to date, Andrew Payne argues that Obama's decision to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 as the SOFA expired was “the final point of a process that sought to balance the strategic benefit of a residual presence with the electoral risk of doing so” (2019, 199). Payne concludes that, for Obama, “forcing through a renewed SOFA was…not worth the political capital at such a sensitive time in the electoral cycle.” As the election drew nearer, Payne argues, Obama's willingness to take on political risk to force a SOFA dampened, and the project was abandoned.…”

“…Others argue (albeit with few internal sources) that Obama was excessively and inappropriately attuned to domestic politics as he crafted military policy (Dueck 2015). Still other political scientists zero in on singular military interventions in order to probe generalizable theoretical arguments that connect domestic incentives to the use of force (Payne 2019(Payne , 2021Saunders 2018). By design these works may tell us more about the generalizability of a particular mechanism across presidents than they illuminate about the collective domestic determinants of military policy during Obama's first term, and the president's sensitivities across crises.…”

One President at a Time? How the President‐Elect Shapes U.S. Foreign Policy during the Transition

“…In shedding light on these questions, the framework we offer below also challenges us to think again about how a new president's relative inexperience can shape policy even before inauguration (Potter 2007; Saunders 2017), as well as how transitional advisory structures unsettle traditional understandings of the role of bureaucratic drivers of foreign policy (Allison and Halperin 1972). More generally, we add to a growing number of studies examining the issue of periodicity in presidential decision making and the influence of the electoral cycle on foreign policy (Armacost 2015; Fawcett and Payne 2022; Payne 2019/20; Quandt 1986).…”