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Replication Data for: Did Georgian Voters Desire Military Escalation in 2008? Experiments & Observations

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Did Georgian Voters Desire Military Escalation in 2008? Experiments & Observations
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DAGL4S
 
Creator Maliniak, Daniel
Driscoll, Jesse
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description In a foreign policy crisis between a strong and weak state, do citizens of the weaker party punish or reward a leader that escalates the crisis? Strong evidence suggests that there were electoral incentives for Georgian escalation in its August 2008 war with Russia. This paper combines data from survey experiments, conducted on Georgian voters just weeks prior to the August 2008 war, with open-ended survey response questions from a survey fielded just weeks after the war. Respondents evaluated their leader's crisis behavior in the aftermath of a real war differently than the evidence from pre-war survey experiments would have suggested. The divergence in findings is demonstrated by providing evidence of three empirical phenomena: a ``Rally 'Round The Flag" effect, a ``Fog Of War" effect, and systematic differences in evaluations of leader performance depending on respondents' proximity to actual violence.
 
Subject Social Sciences
War Initiation
Costly Signals
Public Opinion
Survey Experiments
Georgia
 
Contributor Maliniak, Daniel