Tristan Guerra is an ATER at Sciences Po Grenoble and a PhD student at the Pacte laboratory (@TristanGuerra_)

When a serious and unexpected international crisis occurs, or a major military conflict breaks out, or a criminal terrorist attack is perpetrated, political science has, for almost fifty years, demonstrated a "rally round the flag" effect among national public opinion, which translates into increased support for the government in power, over and above the policies pursued by the latter.

Three mechanisms, which are not mutually exclusive, help to explain this phenomenon. Firstly, when a threat of an existential nature becomes more palpable, citizens tend to turn to political actors who can protect them from the risks posed by such a disruption to the status quo. Secondly, people may also follow a patriotic reflex by rallying behind the government or the President who embody national unity. Thirdly, the prevailing consensus among political elites on responses to the crisis, and the absence of conflict between them reported in the media, can fuel and sustain this rallying of voters from all walks of life to executive power.

Whatever the origins of this public rallying, this support reflex helps politicians in objectively bad and uncertain times to adopt policies dictated by the urgency of the situation. While political support is essential to the smooth running of society and political institutions in ordinary times, confidence in government becomes even more necessary in times of crisis, as it can serve as a resource for the executive to implement the life-saving measures the situation demands, or to strengthen national unity to better assert the country's interests on the international stage.

Rallies past and present

The reactions of American public opinion to certain international crises involving the United States provide canonical examples of this mechanism. The American president saw his popularity soar after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or, ten years earlier, during the American military intervention "Operation Desert Storm" in 1991 during the military engagement in Iraq at the height of the Gulf War.

Similar phenomena were observed during several Cold War episodes (e.g., the Korean War, the Vietnam intervention and the Cuban missile crisis). The scale and longevity of these rallying effects vary, from large-scale (e.g., a 35-percentage-point increase in presidential approval after September 11) and long-lasting (over a year), to more modest and ephemeral effects that last only a few weeks or months at most (waves of attacks during the Hollande quinquennium).

Closer to home, such an effect was observed when the Covid Covid-19 pandemic, which initially rallied public opinion behind the rallied public opinion behind the current executive and led to the the adoption of measures temporarily restricting public freedoms to protect the population from the new health threat. threat.

While this effect was generally reflected in an increase in confidence in the executive and a rise in voting intentions for the party in power, the effect may in fact differ quite widely depending on the intensity of the political conflict and the configuration of domestic institutions. This last observation is in line with work on foreign policy, where responses to external threats primarily reflect the domestic political environment in which they are introduced, far from systematically creating transparent unity.

In Ukraine, the effect of the rally has played itself out spectacularly: President Zelensky's popularity reached 91% on February 22, up 39 points since the beginning of February. Like George W. Bush before the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Zelensky was rather unpopular, amid accusations of amateurism, economic stagnation, corruption and deteriorating relations with Russia.

On the other hand, this rallying will probably be limited in the case of Joe Biden's approval in the USA. Indeed, some political analysts point out that emotional polarization is too intense in the USA between Democrats and Republicans to generate a rally for an issue which, outside the most informed citizens, is still not salient enough to generate a momentum as powerful as during the international crises of recent decades.

Rallying in electoral times, weakening democracy?

When regular elections are due to be held, as is the case in France shortly, the incumbent power should logically benefit from this crisis situation. This has begun to be reflected in the rise in voting intentions for Emmanuel Macron, as illustrated in the figure below.

But war on Europe's doorstep can mean a short campaign, which never really gets off the ground and gives all the candidates little opportunity to put forward their differences. But there is no such thing as an electorate outside elections. Indeed, the whole point of an election campaign is to politicize voters, some of whom are only sporadically interested in politics.

A re-election facilitated by dramatic circumstances and a constrained democratic debate could go hand in hand with a mandate whose legitimacy is narrower than ever, even though domestic conflicts marred the previous quinquennium and durably disrupted the exercise of power and the legitimacy of decisions. A re-election facilitated by the shadow of a conflict that would overshadow the campaign of a presidential election sacralized by the regime of the Fifth Republic, the object of all expectations and all disappointments, could paradoxically weaken the future president's ability to govern. From rallying under the flag to democratic risk, there's sometimes only one election away

This post was originally published on Poliverse on March 10, 2022.