Abstract

Democratic leaders are more prone to domestic sanction following defeats, and these audience costs allow democracies to signal their intentions during public disputes. Empirical tests strongly support this relationship; however, recent criticisms have questioned whether the causal mechanisms of audience costs are responsible for these findings. We provide a unified rationale for why both arguments are correct: democracies rarely contend over territorial issues, a consistently salient and contentious issue. Without these issues, leaders are unable to generate audience costs but are able to choose easy conflicts. Our reexaminations of threat-based and reciprocation-based studies support this argument. We also present tests of within-dispute behavior using MID incident data, which confirms that the salience of territory matters more than regime type when predicting militarized behavior. Any regime differences suggest a disadvantage for democratic challengers over territorial issues, and any peace between dem...

Highlights

  • Democratic leaders are more prone to domestic sanction following defeats, and these audience costs allow democracies to signal their intentions during public disputes

  • Empirical tests strongly support this relationship; recent criticisms have questioned whether the causal mechanisms of audience costs are responsible for these findings

  • Examining the actual threats made by leaders, Snyder and Borghard (2011) and Downes and Sechser (2012) note that few disputes or crises follow the explanations provided by audience cost logic, and systematic examinations demonstrate that the threats made by democratic leaders are not often successful (Downes and Sechser 2012)

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Summary

Political Science

Democracies tend to cluster together in peace (Gleditsch 2002), democracies are unlikely to fight other democracies (Russett and Oneal 2001), and the conflicts that democracies do escalate rarely involve their own territories (Gibler and Miller 2013) These empirical patterns suggest that democracies face few direct threats to their homeland, and this makes situations in which audience costs matter both exceedingly rare and more manipulable by the leader. Because the democratic leader is sheltered from direct threats, she or he has the ability to avoid potential losses and instead initiate disputes only when there is a high likelihood of winning the issue This is why democracies perform poorly when threatening other states yet so few of their challenges are ever reciprocated, and this explanation has far-reaching implications for theories of the democratic peace. We close by arguing that these findings suggest audience costs cannot be a general explanation of the democratic peace but instead support the contention that democracies rarely face contentious issues between them.

Do Democracies Signal Credibly?
Reexamining Previous Studies
Democratic initiator X territory
Extending the Argument
Territory X dem challenge of authoritarian target
Findings
Regime Other
Full Text
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