Soldiers' Funerals Increase Nationalism: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Turkey

Abstract

Soldiers’ funerals are a powerful symbol of sacrifice with ex-ante ambiguous effects on political attitudes and behavior. These funerals could undermine support for the conflict and government or, alternatively, increase nationalism and galvanize support for the war effort. This has significant implications for leaders’ incentives to fight or de-escalate. It is also a thorny empirical question: more hawkish constituencies often send more soldiers to fight, generating selection bias. We provide new causal evidence from Turkey, where compulsory military service and the random assignment of soldiers to posts across the country generate as-if random variation in which districts lose soldiers and host state-organized funerals. We show that soldiers’ funerals induce more hawkish attitudes; roughly double public displays of nationalism, such as protests and violent attacks against the pro-Kurdish party; and modestly increase support for the incumbent party. Our results highlight how soldiers’ funerals intensify nationalist sentiments and mobilization during civil conflicts.