CIVIL-MILITARY COORDINATION A NECESSARY CONDITION IN RALLYING THE PUBLIC IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the condition(s) that influenced the rally around the flag effect in Pakistan’s crises with the US and India between 2011 and 2019. The motivation to study these crises is threefold. First, the elected civilian government completed its term in 2013 for the first time since the independence of Pakistan in 1947 from the British empire, which could signify the shift towards the democratic institutions and crisis decision-making through these institutions as well as a reduced role of the military. Second, the decisions taken by Pakistan during these international crises with India and the US were different in each of these crises despite having similar crisis triggers. This difference in crisis responses by Pakistan provided an opportunity to study which of these responses rallied the public in support and whether there was any common condition in the behavior of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership that could have resulted in the rally effect. Third, conventional wisdom suggests that the rally effect is observed in democratic countries because the public can punish the elected leadership through institutions. On the other hand, there is growing literature that suggests that the rally effect is also observed in non-democracies. The four crises discussed in this thesis provide an opportunity to address these empirical and theoretical puzzles. In the absence of leadership public surveys in Pakistan that have been used in the literature as an indicator of the rally effect, an indirect measure, namely a change in anger, was used to collect evidence of the rally effect. The sentiment analysis of the editorials of two English daily newspapers, Dawn and The Nation, suggests that the public rallied in support of the decisions taken in Salala Attack Crisis and Indian Airstrike Crisis. The analysis of press releases issued by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs representing the civilian government and Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations representing the military suggests that the civilian-military coordination was present in the crises that had the rally effect.