Domestic Politics and the Laws of War: Electoral Vulnerability, Coalition Dynamics, and IHL Compliance in Israel's Gaza Conflicts (2014–2023)

Sammanfattning

Why do states with competitive electoral systems violate International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and how does domestic politics shape their compliance? Existing scholarship on IHL compliance focuses predominantly on international enforcement mechanisms and regime type, leaving undertheorized the role of domestic political incentives in wartime decision-making. This thesis addresses that gap by examining how electoral vulnerability, coalition stability and composition, and public opinion shape a state's incentives to adhere to or violate IHL. Drawing on Selectorate Theory and Audience Cost Theory as its analytical framework, it employs a structured focused comparison of Israel's conduct in two conflicts against the same adversary in the same theatre: Operation Protective Edge (2014) and the Gaza War (2023). These cases share key structural features while unfolding under radically different domestic political conditions, making them wellsuited to isolate the effect of the independent variables. The comparison finds that the 2023 conflict was conducted under domestic political conditions systematically more conducive to IHL violations across all three variables: a more ideologically homogeneous and maximalist coalition, a Prime Minister whose personal legal situation inverted the standard logic of coalition control, and a public whose hawkish initial consensus provided permissive conditions for unchecked escalation. Selectorate Theory accounts for much of the observed variation, particularly through the mechanism of winning coalition composition, but requires an additional scope condition to capture cases where leaders face existential personal consequences from losing power. Audience Cost Theory applies only partially to 2014 and fails to apply to 2023 in its expected form: audience costs were real but mis-targeted, and the threat of removal paradoxically reinforced the incumbent's incentive to prolong the conflict. The findings suggest that domestic political pressure shapes IHL compliance through a configuration of interacting variables rather than a single mechanism and carry practical implications for the use of political monitoring as an early warning tool by humanitarian protection actors.