Rally 'round the flag effect
Based on Wikipedia: Rally 'round the flag effect
On September 10, 2001, George W. Bush's approval rating sat at 51 percent—a middling number for a president who had taken office under the cloud of a contested election. One week later, it was 90 percent. No American president had ever reached that height. What happened in between reshaped not just Bush's presidency but arguably the trajectory of American foreign policy for a generation.
This dramatic swing illustrates one of the most fascinating and troubling patterns in democratic politics: the rally 'round the flag effect. When nations face international crises—especially dramatic, sudden ones—citizens instinctively unite behind their leaders. Criticism evaporates. Partisan divides collapse. The president transforms from a politician into a symbol of national unity.
The effect is temporary. It always fades. But in the meantime, it can change history.
The Political Scientist Who Named It
John Mueller was studying presidential popularity in 1970 when he identified a peculiar pattern running through the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and beyond. Certain moments reliably boosted a president's approval ratings regardless of party, ideology, or the president's prior standing. Mueller called this the "rally 'round the flag effect" and defined its triggers with three criteria.
The event must be international. It must directly involve the United States and particularly the president. And it must be specific, dramatic, and sharply focused—not a slow-burning problem but a sudden crisis that commands the nation's attention.
Mueller catalogued five types of events that produced rallies: sudden military interventions like the Korean War or the Bay of Pigs invasion, major diplomatic initiatives like the Truman Doctrine, dramatic technological developments like the Soviet launch of Sputnik, superpower summits like the Potsdam Conference, and major military developments in ongoing wars like the Tet Offensive.
These categories reveal Mueller's historical moment. They assume a world of two superpowers locked in existential competition, where every international event carries the specter of nuclear annihilation. Modern political scientists consider his framework dated—the Cold War architecture has crumbled—but his core insight endures. People rally around their leaders when they feel threatened from outside.
Why Does This Happen?
Two schools of thought have emerged to explain the psychology behind these rallies, and they tell very different stories about human nature and democratic politics.
The Patriotism School holds that crisis transforms how citizens perceive their president. In normal times, we see the president as a political figure—the leader of one party, opposed by another, making decisions we might agree or disagree with. But when the nation faces external threat, something shifts. The president becomes the embodiment of the country itself. Criticizing the president feels like criticizing America. Unity becomes a patriotic imperative.
This explanation has intuitive appeal. It matches how many people describe their emotional response to events like September 11 or Pearl Harbor. The country feels under attack, and supporting the leader feels like supporting the nation's survival.
The Opinion Leadership School offers a more cynical interpretation. According to this view, citizens don't independently decide to rally behind their president. Instead, they take cues from political elites—particularly members of the opposition party in Congress and the commentators and journalists who cover them.
In normal times, the media reports conflict. Democrats attack Republican presidents; Republicans attack Democratic ones. Citizens hear criticism and absorb it. But during international crises, opposition politicians often mute their criticism. Perhaps they genuinely believe in national unity. Perhaps they fear appearing unpatriotic. Perhaps they simply lack information to challenge the president's handling of a rapidly unfolding situation.
Whatever their motivation, when opposition voices fall silent, the media has no conflict to report. All the public hears is support. The president's approval rises not because citizens have genuinely changed their minds but because they've stopped hearing reasons to disapprove.
Which theory is correct? Researchers generally believe both capture part of the truth, but at different timescales. The Patriotism School better explains why rallies begin—the genuine emotional surge people feel when their country faces crisis. The Opinion Leadership School better explains how long rallies last—their duration depends on whether elite criticism resumes.
The Arithmetic of Crisis
Here's a counterintuitive pattern: unpopular presidents benefit more from rallies than popular ones.
The math is straightforward. A president at 80 percent approval has limited room to grow. Franklin Roosevelt stood at 72 percent before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and rose to 84 percent afterward—a meaningful but modest 12-point increase. George W. Bush, mired in the low 50s before September 11, rocketed up 39 points. He had further to climb.
This creates a dark temptation. A struggling president, watching approval ratings sink, might look at a foreign crisis not as a problem to solve but as an opportunity to exploit. Political scientists call this "diversionary foreign policy"—the use of international conflict to distract from domestic troubles.
How often does this actually happen? The evidence is mixed and hotly debated. But the mere possibility shapes how we should think about presidential decision-making during international crises.
The Constitutional Amplifier
There's something peculiar about the American presidency that may intensify rally effects: the Constitution makes the president both head of government and head of state.
In parliamentary democracies like the United Kingdom, these roles split. The monarch serves as head of state—the symbolic embodiment of the nation, above partisan politics. The prime minister serves as head of government—a political figure who leads one party and battles the opposition. When crisis strikes, Britons can rally around the crown while still criticizing the government's response.
Americans lack this option. The same person who represents the country at state dinners and lays wreaths at military cemeteries also proposes budgets, nominates judges, and fights political battles. During a crisis, criticizing the president's policies can feel like attacking the country itself.
This dual role provides a temporary boost—the head-of-state symbolism creates unity. But it eventually reverses. As the crisis fades, the president must make partisan decisions that remind voters of the head-of-government role. The approval rating sinks back toward its baseline.
Measuring the Effect
University of Alabama political scientist John O'Neal tried to quantify exactly what produces rallies. His mathematical models incorporated measurable factors: the number of New York Times headlines about the crisis, whether bipartisan support existed, the president's prior popularity.
His analysis supported the Opinion Leadership School. The volume of media coverage mattered less than whether that coverage presented unified elite support or partisan disagreement.
Matthew Baum of UCLA added another dimension. He found that rallies draw their strength specifically from independents and opposition party members shifting their support. This makes intuitive sense. A president's partisans already support the president. They can't rally further. The rally effect requires people who normally oppose the president to temporarily set aside their opposition.
This leads to Baum's most important finding: rallies are larger when the country is more divided beforehand. If 90 percent of the country already supports the president, there's nowhere to go. But if the nation is split down the middle, with intense opposition from one side, a crisis can convert skeptics into supporters—at least temporarily.
Division, paradoxically, creates the potential for unity.
The United Nations Factor
Terrence Chapman and Dan Reiter discovered that not all crises produce equal rallies. Specifically, they found that United Nations Security Council support amplifies the effect by eight to nine percentage points.
Why would international approval boost domestic presidential approval? Perhaps Security Council endorsement signals that the president's actions are justified—if other nations agree, maybe we should too. Perhaps it reduces concern about American overreach or adventurism. Perhaps it simply provides additional elite voices supporting the president.
Whatever the mechanism, the finding suggests that rallies aren't purely about nationalism or patriotism. International legitimacy matters. Americans want to believe their country is acting rightly, and foreign endorsement provides reassurance.
How Long Does It Last?
Every rally ends. The question is when.
A 2019 study examining ten countries over a 24-year period found a consistent pattern. During the first year of a military intervention with casualties, the governing party benefits from rally effects. But the rally decays. By roughly four and a half years, the effect reverses—voters begin punishing rather than rewarding the governing party for ongoing conflict.
More recent research has cast doubt on whether rallies are as reliable as once believed. A 2021 study found the effects weaker than expected. A 2023 study reached a startling conclusion: militarized interstate disputes, on average, actually decrease public support for national leaders rather than increasing it.
Perhaps the rally effect was always rarer than assumed. Perhaps media fragmentation has undermined elite consensus, making it easier for opposition voices to break through. Perhaps citizens have grown more cynical about leaders using international conflict for political gain.
Ending Wars Can Rally Too
Here's an underappreciated finding: presidents don't just get approval boosts from starting or escalating conflicts. They can also gain from ending them.
A 2022 study examined all available presidential polling and crisis data from 1953 to 2016. When presidents terminated international crises, they received an average three-point approval bump. The researchers suggest this reflects proof of competence—the president demonstrated the ability to navigate a dangerous situation to a successful conclusion.
This finding offers a less cynical view of presidential incentives. If leaders can gain politically from ending conflicts rather than starting them, the rally effect doesn't necessarily push toward war. A president seeking approval has options beyond sending troops.
Case Studies: A Century of Rallies
The Spirit of 1914
The rally effect predates Mueller's naming of it by more than half a century. When World War One began in August 1914, belligerent nations across Europe experienced sudden collapses of political division.
This was astonishing. Europe's socialist parties had pledged for years to oppose capitalist wars. Workers had no interest in killing each other for the benefit of their ruling classes, socialist leaders argued. International working-class solidarity would prevent war.
It didn't. When war came, socialist parties across Europe abandoned their pledges and endorsed their governments. The Second International—the global alliance of socialist parties—shattered. French socialists embraced the "Sacred Union." German Social Democrats, the largest socialist party in the world, voted for war credits in the Reichstag. Kaiser Wilhelm II declared a Burgfrieden—literally "castle peace"—suspending normal partisan politics.
In Britain, the effect was equally dramatic. The country had been teetering toward civil war over Irish Home Rule. Ulster Protestants, backed by the Conservative Party and some military officers, had threatened armed resistance to Irish self-governance. The Curragh Mutiny saw British Army officers effectively refuse potential orders to enforce the law in Ulster.
When war with Germany began, all of this evaporated. Irish nationalists, suffragettes demanding women's voting rights, militant trade unionists—all muted their protests to support the war effort. The Liberal government that had seemed fragile suddenly commanded overwhelming support.
The rally would later have electoral consequences. David Lloyd George, who became prime minister during the war, called a "coupon election" in 1918. Candidates endorsed by his coalition government—marked with what critics called a "Coalition Coupon"—won in a landslide. The Liberal Party, divided between Lloyd George's coalition and opposition Liberals, never recovered. It remains a minor party today.
Churchill's War
Winston Churchill's wartime popularity illustrates both the power and limits of rally effects.
Churchill had been a political pariah through much of the 1930s, warning about Nazi Germany while his Conservative Party pursued appeasement. When war came and appeasement failed, Churchill became prime minister. His approval ratings never fell below 78 percent for his entire wartime premiership. All major parties joined his war ministry. He was the nation personified.
But here's the catch: Churchill's personal popularity didn't transfer to the Conservative Party. Voters remembered that Conservatives had supported appeasement and presided over the grinding poverty and unemployment of the interwar years. Labour promised a welfare state and nationalization of industry. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Churchill called an election.
He lost in a landslide. The same voters who had rallied around Churchill the war leader rejected Churchill the Conservative politician. Rally effects, it seems, attach to the leader as national symbol. They don't necessarily extend to the leader's party or policies.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, American spy planes discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. For thirteen days, the world stood at the brink of nuclear war.
John F. Kennedy's approval rating before the crisis was 61 percent—respectable but not extraordinary. By November, after Kennedy had navigated the crisis through a combination of military pressure and secret diplomacy, his approval stood at 74 percent. It peaked at 76 percent in December.
Then it faded. By June 1963, Kennedy was back at 61 percent. The rally lasted roughly six months—long enough to matter politically, short enough to confirm the temporary nature of crisis-driven popularity.
The Tehran Hostage Crisis
Jimmy Carter's experience demonstrates how rally effects can reverse when crisis management fails.
When Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979, taking 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage, Carter's approval surged 23 points to 61 percent. Americans rallied behind their president in response to what felt like a national humiliation.
But the hostages weren't released. Day after day, the networks counted the length of the captivity. An attempted military rescue mission failed disastrously, with helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. Carter's handling of the crisis came under sustained criticism.
By November 1980, Carter was back at his pre-crisis approval rating. He lost reelection to Ronald Reagan. The hostages were released minutes after Reagan's inauguration—an act of Iranian spite toward Carter that underscored his inability to resolve the crisis.
Desert Storm
The 1991 Gulf War produced the most dramatic rally since World War Two—until September 11 surpassed it.
George H. W. Bush stood at 59 percent approval in January 1991 as the air campaign against Iraq began. By late February, after the ground war had liberated Kuwait in just 100 hours, Bush hit 89 percent. For a moment, he seemed unbeatable.
The decline was swift. By October 1991, Bush was back at 61 percent. The rally had evaporated in eight months. By the 1992 election, with the economy struggling and Bush seeming out of touch, Bill Clinton won comfortably.
Bush's trajectory became a cautionary tale. A popular war is not a guarantee of political success. Domestic concerns eventually reassert themselves. As political strategist James Carville famously put it, "It's the economy, stupid."
September 11 and Its Aftermath
No rally in American history matched what happened after September 11, 2001. George W. Bush's 39-point surge to 90 percent approval remains unprecedented in the era of modern polling. More remarkably, the rally persisted. Thirteen months after the attacks, Bush still stood at 68 percent—significantly above his pre-attack baseline.
Many scholars believe this extended rally gave Bush the political capital to invade Iraq in 2003. The war, launched on the premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat, would never have been possible without the reservoir of trust and unity created by September 11.
When no weapons of mass destruction materialized and the occupation descended into chaos and insurgency, that trust eroded. But by then, the war was underway. The rally effect had shaped history in ways that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
Obama's Limited Rallies
Barack Obama experienced smaller, shorter rallies—perhaps reflecting the increasing polarization of American politics.
When U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Obama's approval rose from 45 percent to 53 percent. By mid-July—just ten weeks later—he was back at 45 percent. The rally barely lasted the summer.
A similar pattern followed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012. Obama's approval rose from 50 percent to 56 percent as the nation grieved and the president offered consolation. By mid-January, the effect had faded.
These abbreviated rallies suggest that elite consensus has become harder to sustain. In a fragmented media environment, opposition voices can quickly reassert themselves. The Opinion Leadership School's prediction holds: without sustained elite unity, rallies dissipate quickly.
International Patterns
The rally effect isn't uniquely American. The same psychological and political dynamics operate elsewhere—sometimes with darker implications.
Turkey's Manufactured Crisis
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party suffered unexpected losses in June 2015 parliamentary elections, forcing an unwelcome coalition government. Erdoğan's response illustrates the dangerous temptation rally effects create.
He resumed military operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (known by its Kurdish initials PKK), reigniting a conflict that had been under a fragile ceasefire. The violence allowed Erdoğan to dissolve parliament and call new elections in November 2015, which his party won decisively.
The cost of this political maneuver was staggering. The conflict that Erdoğan revived for electoral advantage has killed over 30,000 people—more than 7,000 in Turkey itself and over 23,000 in Turkish military operations abroad. Rally effects, in the wrong hands, can become pretexts for war.
Putin's Wars
Vladimir Putin has benefited repeatedly from rally effects tied to military aggression.
When Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Putin's approval rose 10 points to over 71 percent. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, his approval surged from 69 percent in January to 83 percent in March. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin experienced a parallel boost.
These rallies have proven more durable than typical American examples. Putin's authoritarian control of Russian media means opposition voices cannot break through to undermine the patriotic narrative. The Opinion Leadership School would predict exactly this: without elite criticism reaching the public, rallies persist.
Zelenskyy's Transformation
The same conflict that boosted Putin produced an even more dramatic rally for Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy—with an important difference.
Before the invasion, Zelenskyy's approval rating in Ukraine stood at a dismal 30 percent. He was a former comedian who had promised to end corruption and bring peace with Russia. Neither promise had materialized. By the standards of rally effect theory, he had enormous room to grow.
When Russian forces crossed the border, Zelenskyy transformed from an unpopular president into a wartime leader of global stature. His refusal to flee Kyiv—reportedly telling Americans who offered evacuation that he needed "ammunition, not a ride"—crystallized his new image. His approval in Ukraine soared to 90 percent.
Remarkably, Zelenskyy also achieved something approaching a rally effect in foreign countries. His approval rating among Americans reached 70 percent. He addressed legislatures around the world to standing ovations. The rally effect, it seems, can cross borders when a leader comes to symbolize resistance to aggression rather than aggression itself.
The Pandemic Exception
The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unusual test case. An international crisis, to be sure—the virus respected no borders. Dramatic and sharply focused—the entire world watched daily death counts. But it differed from military conflict in crucial ways.
Initially, many world leaders experienced rally effects. Donald Trump's approval ticked upward in March 2020. Emmanuel Macron, Giuseppe Conte, Mark Rutte, and Boris Johnson all saw their popularity surge. Johnson, who contracted COVID-19 himself and spent time in intensive care, led what briefly became Britain's most popular government in decades.
Former NATO Secretary General George Robertson predicted correctly: "People do rally around, but it evaporates fast." The pandemic rallies proved fleeting. Unlike wars, which have clear enemies and patriotic narratives, pandemics require sustained public health measures that inevitably become politicized. Mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccination requirements divided rather than united. The rally effect requires external threat; the pandemic's domestic policy implications transformed it into internal political conflict.
The Danger of the Effect
Every scholar who studies the rally effect eventually confronts a disturbing question: if leaders know that international crises boost their popularity, might they manufacture or prolong crises for political gain?
The academic term is "diversionary foreign policy" or "diversionary war theory." The cynical version holds that a struggling leader, facing domestic troubles and plummeting approval, might engineer a foreign confrontation to rally the public and distract from failures at home.
The evidence for this is contested. Most presidents don't start wars to boost poll numbers. But at the margins, the incentive exists. A leader might take a harder line than necessary. Might reject a diplomatic solution that could have worked. Might extend a conflict beyond strategic necessity because the patriotic rally remains useful.
Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu has faced accusations along these lines—critics argue he has prolonged the war in Gaza partly to maintain his political position and avoid corruption prosecution. Turkey's Erdoğan demonstrably reignited a conflict to win an election. The temptation is real.
What the Effect Tells Us About Democracy
The rally 'round the flag effect reveals something profound about democratic citizens. We like to imagine ourselves as rational evaluators of government performance, rewarding leaders who do well and punishing those who fail. The rally effect suggests something different.
When we feel threatened, evaluation gives way to solidarity. The president's job performance matters less than the president's symbolic role. We rally not because we've concluded the leader is handling the crisis well but because rallying feels right—patriotic, unified, strong.
This instinct made sense for most of human history. Small groups facing external threats needed to put aside internal disputes and unite for survival. Those who fractured lost. Those who rallied survived.
But in a world of nuclear weapons, global media, and leaders who understand how to manipulate these instincts, the rally effect becomes a vulnerability. It can be exploited. It can lead us to support wars we might otherwise question. It can give leaders latitude they haven't earned.
Understanding the effect is the first step toward resisting its manipulation—not to become unpatriotic, but to distinguish between genuine unity in genuine crisis and manufactured unity for political gain. The republic depends on citizens capable of making that distinction.