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 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.

中文翻译：

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强人也哭了：空中轰炸对竞争独裁统治者投票的影响

接触空中轰炸对目标国家领导人的投票有何影响？选民是否倾向于惩罚政策失败的现任者？这些问题与了解目标国家的战后政治息息相关，因为空中轰炸仍然是用于胁迫谈判的最致命和最广泛使用的军事选择之一。尽管这些问题具有历史和当代相关性，但在空中力量文献中只有少数研究认为战略轰炸会产生暂时的集结效应，但除了政治冷漠之外不会产生后续的政治后果。大多数研究忽略了州内的重要差异，即使领导责任在次州一级可能有很大差异。本文使用差异识别策略分析了 1999 年北约轰炸南斯拉夫对塞尔维亚地方选举的影响，并确定了空袭对斯洛博丹·米洛舍维奇政权投票份额的影响。结果显示，该政权的投票份额在遭受轰炸的城市中下降了 2.6%。挑战先前的研究，这一发现表明，即使在竞争激烈的威权政权中，追溯投票也适用于空中轰炸。