Last week on Deep Dive, we looked into the effects of elections on America’s war effort in Iraq. This week, we’ll take a step back to examine the rest of the “coalition of the willing” and look at some recent research on that coalition’s most notable attribute: its dwindling size.

Political scientist Patrick Mello has an article in the European Journal of International Security examining why countries — and particularly democracies — left the American-led coalition to invade and occupy Iraq when they did. When countries sign on to join a war effort, they usually claim to be in it, as they say, to win it. As wars drag on, however, countries sometimes choose to drop out of military coalitions — to defect from them, in political science speak. The Iraq War is a useful case for studying coalition defection because so many countries defected from America’s coalition. Between 2003 and 2008, 18 democratically elected national leaders announced their countries’ unwillingness to remain in the coalition of the willing.

The most famous Iraq War coalition defection was Spain’s decision to withdraw in 2004, directly after a national election. A major al-Qaeda attack in Madrid, just before the election killed 193 people, and the center-right government’s bungled response played a part in a major electoral victory by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). New PSOE prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero immediately announced Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq, following through on a campaign promise.

As Mello shows, however, the Spain case was something of a perfect storm. Over the course of a long war, you might expect that defection would arise after the leaders who originally joined the coalition lost elections and were replaced by their political opponents. That happens, but, as Mello demonstrates, it’s actually quite rare and depends on other factors. Many coalition countries went through leadership changes without leaving the coalition. Mello found that leadership change only led to defection when the new leaders were significantly to the political left of the outgoing party, and when new elections were not imminent. That accounts for Spain’s defection, and for the less dramatic defections of Italy, Australia, Hungary, and Slovakia. 

More striking is that many withdrawal decisions came from the exact same leaders who agreed to join the coalition in the first place. As casualties mounted — both military and civilian — and the war became less and less popular, many leaders who had initially signed on to the invasion had changes of heart. These leaders tended to be more conservative, and their withdrawal decisions came when they were not facing new elections — perhaps to maintain their credibility as hawks. Leaders in Honduras, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the Philippines all followed this path to defection. That’s an interesting finding, because most research on earlier wars suggested that risk of coalition defection increased around election time. The Iraq War, it turns out, made exiting war so popular that even some leaders whose political personas depended on them being warlike bailed on it.

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