Strongmen cry too: The effect of aerial bombing on voting for the incumbent in competitive autocracies

Abstract

How does exposure to aerial bombing influence voting for the target country’s leadership? Do voters tend to punish incumbents for policy failure? These questions are relevant for understanding the target country’s postwar politics because aerial bombing remains one of the deadliest and most widely used military options for coercive bargaining. Despite the historical and contemporary relevance of these questions, there are only a few studies in the air-power literature arguing that strategic bombing produces a temporary rally effect but no subsequent political consequences other than political apathy. Most studies ignore important variation within states even though leadership responsibility can vary tremendously on the substate level. This article analyzes the effect of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on Serbian local elections using the difference-in-differences identification strategy and identifies the effect of airstrikes on the vote-share of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. The results show that the regime’s vote-share is 2.6% lower in municipalities exposed to the bombing. Challenging prior studies, this finding demonstrates that retrospective voting applies to aerial bombing even in competitive authoritarian regimes.