How Conflict Turns the Public into a Single-Issue Voting Bloc

Bush’s approval ratings following the Sept. 11th attacks skyrocketed as the country came together in a time of grief and shock to face a foreign threat.

Time is the most valuable resource that citizens have, and the time that it takes to become even relatively politically well-informed comes with a heavy opportunity cost, as that time could be used in other productive pursuits. As a result, most of the public makes use of heuristics or mental shortcuts to process information quickly when making political decisions. These shortcuts will take a small amount of information that is readily available and use that information to develop a broadly relevant opinion on a candidate or position. In theory, this means that certain things can be used as indicators as to what individuals should believe. Ideally, this can create a relatively ill-informed public that nonetheless expresses rational and competent beliefs that can guide representatives to enact good policies.

A clear example of heuristics informing the political opinion of voters is through the “rally around the flag” phenomenon, in which approval for the president will drastically and quickly increase in the face of international conflict or war.

This is a shortcut that effectively turns the population into a group of single-issue voters, as presidential approval becomes closely tied to a specific conflict within the nation’s foreign policy. Previous presidents, regardless of previous popularity, party, and the domestic political situation within America have all enjoyed approval bumps following any sort of armed conflict or foreign policy development. Voters are taking the cue of a conflict on the international stage and using it to qualify their support for their leader. It is the act of distinguishing between friend and foe, and lending support to the president, as the most visible authority figure within the country, so that the crisis may be dealt with. As such, the rally heuristic may best be viewed as an attachment of value to the authority of the office over any sort of personal considerations to the individual who holds the office at the time of conflict.

The phenomenon of this heuristic is best exemplified in the days following the September 11th attacks in 2001. George W. Bush held an approval rating of 51% from September 7–10, which spiked considerably following the attacks to 90% by September 21–22. Increases of significant, though nominally less, magnitude can be seen in H. W. Bush’s approval ratings following the First Gulf War (a 24 point increase), Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis (a 13 point increase), Carter during the Iranian Hostage Crisis (a 19 point increase), Reagan during the invasion of Grenada (an 8 point increase) and Obama following the death of Bin Laden (also an 8 point increase).

The size of the approval increase varies from conflict to conflict and president to president, which can be attributed to different levels of severity. For example, the largest bump followed the September 11th attacks in 2001, seeing a 49 point increase for George W. Bush, but was also a devastating attack on American soil, whereas the relatively less significant increase of 8 points in Barack Obama’s approval rating following Osama Bin Laden’s death represented a major development within the conflict that had been ongoing since the initial attacks in 2001.

The increased public approval that the president enjoys in the immediate aftermath of international conflict and crisis can aid in the decision-making process by allowing them the political capital to make decisive policy moves. For example, it is easy to see how such a marked increase to near-universal approval of George W. Bush led to a 420–1 vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution in the House of Representatives and 98–0 in the Senate that led to military action in Afghanistan, as well as the passage of the Authorization for use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which has a self-explanatory title and which started the Second Gulf War.

This heuristic is not beneficial to the democratic institutions that make up the core of the American political system. Massive movements in public opinion following a crisis represents emotional, not rational decision-making. This can encourage politicians to pursue policy paths which may not end up being in the best interest of the country, or which the public will eventually change their mind on as the crisis becomes temporally distant. For instance, 23% of respondents said that the invasion of Iraq was not a mistake in March of 2003, compared to 60% who said that it was a mistake in August of 2008.

However, this is a double-edged sword. Public opinion gives the executive office more political power to make decisions, increasing the costs that the other arms of government, particularly Congress, faces in opposing the decisions that the president makes. For example, it would have been very hard to justify opposition to military intervention in Afghanistan as a representative following the 9/11 attacks, undermining the democratic institutions that underpin American government. On the other hand, what is bad for democratic institutions is not universally bad for the country. A lack of a response from Bush, if the rally heuristic had not given him adequate leverage to pass quick policy and declare a war on terrorism, would have signaled weakness to the rest of the world, increased fears of instability in the global economy, and could have potentially invited increased conflict and further attacks from groups that opposed the US.

Within the context of political decision-making, the rally around the flag heuristic creates a unified domestic front in the face of foreign conflict, allowing the President political capital and increased agency in which to pursue foreign policy goals and reducing the influence of Congress. This heuristic is based primarily within the emotional reaction that the public has to an international conflict, and thus represents an easily comprehensible but irrational and emotional response which undermines democratic institution. While the September 11th attacks prove to be the clearest example of how increased presidential approval can guide foreign policy development, further research to support this hypothesis would have to be completed. An examination of public approval of Franklin Roosevelt’s approval following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the throughout the course of the Second World War would prove valuable, as that information was not available at the time of writing. A further examination of whether increased presidential approval influenced voting behavior, either through increased turnout or through conversions of independent or moderate voters, would also prove to be valuable in understanding the full effects of this phenomena.