Echoes of Terrorism: How the Timing of Siren Alerts Shapes Voting (a sair)

This study documents how national security threats impact voting behavior. Leveraging novel data on siren timing and location in Israel, we estimate a difference-in-differences design that compares localities brought into rocket range just before the 2015 election with otherwise similar areas. While almost all rockets from that period were intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system, the analysis shows that Red Alerts on the days immediately before the election boosted Likud’s vote share by 2.6 percentage points, while earlier alerts had no effect. Effects are larger where Likud support was already higher. Analysis of Google search data shows that alerts increased interest in security-related topics without a corresponding increase in searches for political parties or general politics. Our findings are consistent with an increase in the salience of security threats, with incumbency effects, and with rally-around-the-flag effects.