Public Opinion and Crisis Behavior in a Nuclearized South Asia

Abstract

Research on public opinion and crisis behavior has focused largely on pressures felt by leaders who have initiated a crisis, not on leaders in target states responding to adversary provocation. Our survey experiment involving 1,823 respondents in Punjab, Pakistan, finds public support for escalating rather than de-escalating in response to such provocation. It shows how public pressures can encourage conflict even in instances where a leader has engaged in no prior effort to generate audience costs following crisis onset. Survey respondents were more likely to support escalatory decisions if they were made by a military, rather than civilian, leader, although we do not find that military leaders receive more support in de-escalatory decisions. Finally, while we demonstrate that leaders can mitigate the costs of de-escalating by highlighting the dangers of conflict, they still incur opportunity costs in foregone public support when they opt to de-escalate rather than escalate a crisis.

Borders and bullies: How borders shape perceptions of security and foreign policy preferences

“…The possibly more pressing question is how living in the vicinity of disputed boundary lines shapes expectations on how to counter expansionist policies by a substantially stronger neighbor. People might support escalating a crisis when provoked by a militarily superior opponent (Clary et al, 2021). In Georgia, prior to its 2008 war with Russia, “the entire political spectrum of Georgian voters […] desired that their government pursue aggressive wartime bargaining behaviors vis-a`-vis Russia” (Driscoll and Maliniak, 2016, 270).…”

Provocation, Bargaining, and War

“…A wave of recent literature establishes that actors in international politics can "provoke" their foreign adversaries to become more resolved to fight. Actions that anger, offend, or humiliate the leadership or domestic population of an opponent can increase its willingness to fight and raise the risk of war (Barnhart 2017(Barnhart , 2020Cho 2018;Clary, Lalwani and Siddiqui 2021;Dafoe, Hatz and Zhang 2021;Dafoe et al 2022;Gottfried and Trager 2016;Hall 2017;Kertzer and Rathbun 2015;Kurizaki 2007;Kydd and Walter 2006;Masterson 2022;McDermott, Lopez and Hatemi 2017;O'Neill 1999;Powers and Altman 2023;Quek and Johnston 2017;Sticher 2021). But despite being understood as a fundamentally emotional phenomenon, provocation has strategic implications for interstate crisis bargaining that have gone unexplored.…”