Audience Costs Research Articles

Traditional Authorities and Strategies in Demands for Self-Determination

Abstract Ethnic groups employ different strategies to pursue demands for self-determination. While some act within conventional channels of political contestation, others choose non-conventional strategies, including violence and rebellion. We conceive of this as a result of bargaining between group and state and argue that both sides’ institutions affect the likelihood of escalation. Specifically, groups with traditional authorities have the capacity and incentives to escalate conflicts. Only when such institutions are matched with internal accountability mechanisms can groups credibly commit so that bargaining failure and violence less likely. Similarly, states with open elections can tie their hands more effectively, and constitutional regulations of traditional authorities formalize state-group interactions, which also mitigates the effect of traditional authorities on conflict. We use new global data on groups that demand self-determination, their traditional political institutions, and their strategy choice from 2005 to 2015. We find support for our argument using various identification and estimation approaches. Groups with traditional authorities are much more likely to use violence, a finding that is not sensitive to the omission of unobserved confounders. Furthermore, this relationship is moderated by group-level audience costs and the strategic environment provided by the state. Our findings advance new perspectives on the interactions of customary and national institutions in determining subnational conflict.

Layered localization of international human rights law: Signaling and contestation in the context of Thailand

To make international human rights enforceable on the ground, they must be localized. In the process, domestic stakeholders may attempt to contest or reshape the rights. Although norm localization has received much scholarly attention, prior publications have failed to explain which elements of a human rights treaty might be contested and why. Based on signaling theory, this article starts from the assumption that governments’ commitments to human rights treaties raise corresponding expectations on the part of other states. Consequently, contestation is relatively more likely when a government considers the audience costs for backtracking on its commitments to be lower. The article goes on to suggest that expected audience costs vary for different treaty elements—primary, secondary, and tertiary—which in turn affects the relative likelihood of contestation. The article develops a novel approach to norm localization and applies it to the making of a treaty-transposing law against torture and enforced disappearance in Thailand. The case study largely confirms the model but also demonstrates the significance of local specifics, such as a history of impunity. The findings allow theoretical and practical conclusions for the legislative localization of international human rights law.

Audience Costs and the Credibility of Public versus Private Threats in International Crises

Abstract The credibility of public versus private threats in international crisis bargaining has received scholarly attention. While public threats are often believed to be more credible than private ones because of audience costs, others contend that private threats should be equally credible or even more. Also, the effect of public threats can be conditioned by other domestic factors such as domestic hawkishness and a leader’s unpopularity. To test these competing expectations, I conducted a conjoint survey experiment that examines how observers assess resolve to fight in an international crisis with a sample of US citizens (N = 1,203). Three major findings stand out. First, evidence suggests that both types of threats increase the perceived likelihood that a country will stand firm. Second, though their effect size is small, public threats are more effective than private ones. Lastly, I find support for the conditional effect of public threats, indicating that the underlying mechanism of the credibility of public threats is domestic audience costs.

Audience costs, humiliation, and social creativity strategies: how Beijing boosts citizens’ esteem in international conflicts

Can Beijing afford to appear weak, especially after threatening an adversary to escalate in an international crisis? According to audience costs theory, the more high-profile a threat is, the more difficult it would be for a government to back down. Its citizens expect it to stand firm and punish it if it does not. One explanation for the “micro” logic of audience costs is that from a sociopsychological perspective, backing down sullies the national honor. It harms an in-group’s collective self-esteem vis-à-vis the adversarial out-group. The humiliation that citizens endure would compel them to punish their government. In this article, I examine how humiliation can be redressed proactively. I argue that governments—in this case, that of China—may not just brace for a backlash. They resort to a range of what scholars of Social Identity Theory in psychology call “social creativity strategies” in their propaganda to alleviate their citizens’ sense of humiliation. Such strategies arrest—and in some cases, even reverse—damage done to the in-group’s collective self-esteem. I present and elaborate on 10 such strategies. I demonstrate how they work with anecdotes and two case studies on Chinese propaganda in the aftermath of Japan’s “nationalization” of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands (2012) and the country’s standoff with India in Doklam/Donglang (2017).

Managing constraint: frugal opposition to European fiscal solidarity

ABSTRACT The management of the COVID-19 crisis and, in particular, the Next Generation EU fund have shown that European leaders can find integrationist policy solutions despite increasing politicisation at home where democratic constraints may lead to a feared ‘multilevel politics trap’. Therefore, we ask whether and how national governments can manage such constraints and thus spring or avoid the trap. Theoretically, we argue that the agency of governments is a crucial factor for understanding the varying dynamics of politicisation in regional integration, as governments can raise or lower domestic audience costs by strategically interacting with their parliament or media. Empirically, we probe the plausibility of our theoretical propositions by examining constraint management and position-taking in Austria and the Netherlands in the context of European fiscal solidarity. Our results show that there is no inevitably self-reinforcing multilevel politics trap but that the effects of domestic constraint are, to a considerable extent, contingent on the agency of national governments.

Microfoundations of domestic audience costs in nondemocratic regimes: Experimental evidence from Putin’s Russia

Do leaders in nondemocratic regimes face public backlash when they threaten to use military force and back down? Whether citizens disapprove of empty threats is central to studying the domestic ‘audience costs’ in international crisis bargaining, but there is little experimental evidence of this phenomenon from autocracies. In this research article, I present the results of an original survey experiment investigating the microfoundations of domestic audience costs in the Russian Federation. My findings showed that even in Putin’s Russia, the citizens expressed attitudes in line with the audience costs theory. However, I also demonstrate that the effect of audience costs treatments was significantly stronger for the opponents of the current Russian leadership than for the supporters. The results of this study represent an important contribution to the existing literature by providing micro-level empirical evidence from a personalist nondemocratic regime.

Managing the Costs of Backing Down: A “Mirror Experiment” on Reputations and Audience Costs in a Real-World Conflict

Managing the Costs of Backing Down: A “Mirror Experiment” on Reputations and Audience Costs in a Real-World Conflict

Decentralised information transmission in the shadow of conflict

Miscalculations due to lack of information are often seen as one of the main causes of war. Yet, a privately informed country has multiple channels to share information and avoid a costly conflict. I study three ways information can be transmitted – sunk cost signals, audience costs, and military build-up. In a fully decentralised setting, where the uninformed country can perfectly adjust its response to the information it learns, the three channels produce very different outcomes. Sunk cost signals never transmit any information. Information transmission is possible with audience costs when the uninformed country sufficiently values peace. With military build-up, information transmission occurs by accident. It is a by-product of the privately informed country’s attempt to increase its strength. I contrast these findings with the case of a constrained uninformed country that can only choose between a limited number of offers.

Election Accomplished: Democracies and the Timing of Peacekeeper Drawdowns

Peacekeepers play a vital role in enforcing agreements and promoting stability after a civil war, but participation is costly. While troop-contributing countries may appreciate the material and diplomatic benefits that come with performing this task, they also want to minimize the associated costs and potential downsides of the mission. We examine troop contributions in post-civil war peacekeeping missions, determining which countries are most prone to withdrawal and when. Drawing from a domestic audience cost perspective, we argue that those countries that are most exposed to political risk from scandals or fiascoes are most apt to flee, viewing post-war elections as identifiable exit points. Using data on more than 50 peacekeeping operations between 1996 and 2017, we analyze troop contribution dynamics for over 155 different countries to determine whether and when post-war elections prompt peacekeepers to exit. We find evidence that democratic states are more likely either to withdraw completely from UN missions or to reduce their contributions by removing peacekeepers from the front lines in the wake of host country elections.

State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’ A new perspective on domestic terrorism

When it comes to domestic terrorism (DT), state capacity matters in ‘the middle.’ Our article aims to bring together two apparently separate strands of terrorism research: one concerning the effects of regime type; and another concerning the effects of state capacity. We argue that state capacity can reduce DT in anocracies, but not so much in full dictatorships and democracies. Terrorists seek to maximize the reach of their attacks by exposing themselves to a larger audience. As a result, regimes with higher audience costs tend to be more vulnerable to domestic terror attacks. In anocracies, there is room for state capacity to influence the audience costs of a domestic terrorist attack. In full democracies and dictatorships, on the other hand, state capacity has little influence on the audience costs of DT. Consequently, if previous studies have purported linear, U-shaped, and inverted- U-shaped links between democracy and terrorism, we argue that the shape of the relationship is contingent on the level of state capacity. Theoretically, we substantiate our argument with a two-player simultaneous game between a terrorist group and a government. On the empirical side, we conduct a series of negative binomial panel regressions upon a time-series cross-sectional dataset of no less than 108 countries from 1970 to 2007.

The “Commitment Trap” Revisited: Experimental Evidence on Ambiguous Nuclear Threats

AbstractIn this paper, we provide an empirical test for the theoretical claim that ambiguous nuclear threats create a “commitment trap” for American leaders: when deterrence fails, supposedly they are more likely to order the use of nuclear weapons to avoid domestic audience costs for backing down. We designed an original survey experiment and fielded it to a sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens. We found no evidence of a commitment trap when ambiguous nuclear threats are made. Unlike explicit threats, ambiguous ones did not generate domestic disapproval when the leader backed down; the decision to employ nuclear weapons led to more public backlash for the leader than being caught bluffing; and the threats did not influence public preference for nuclear use across our scenarios. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on nuclear crisis bargaining and policy debates over the future of US declaratory policy.

A game of domestic imperatives: Audience costs and conflict avoidance

I propose an audience costs game with considerations added from selectorate theory. We see that winning coalition and selectorate size have competing effects on conflict choices in an audience costs setting. Large coalition regimes face lower audience costs than non-democracies, making it harder for them to commit to war. But larger selectorates increase the value of office, making conflict escalation more attractive. Coalition effects dominate when interacted with selectorate size. Evidence from 1816–2014 supports the game's implications. The results indicate that both threat initiation and dispute resolution are better predicted by focusing on domestic, leader-specific variables.

Backing Out but Backing In Audience Costs? A Replication of Levy et al. (2015)

AbstractLevy et al. (2015) propose that inconsistency audience costs are caused in two ways: backing out of military commitment or backing into foreign conflicts. We replicate their experiment in July–August, 2021. Like many other studies, we find evidence for audience costs caused by backing out. However, our findings indicate that, unlike Levy et al., citizens are no less supportive of a leader who backs into a military conflict despite an initial commitment to stay out than one who behaves consistently. This study has significant theoretical and methodological implications. Theoretically, the importance of inconsistency in audience cost literature may be overstated or inconsistency audience costs may be bounded by temporal domains or contexts. Methodologically, our study emphasizes the necessity of replications because major findings can become conventional wisdom without such additional analysis.

Courts Against Democracy: Audience Costs, Judicial Alliance Networks, and Democratic Erosion in Turkey

Courts Against Democracy: Audience Costs, Judicial Alliance Networks, and Democratic Erosion in Turkey

Mediated Audience Costs: Jordan–Israeli Diplomacy before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War

Abstract Audience cost theory remains prominent in scholarship on international crises. However, the theory suffers from several weaknesses, including a lack of historical evidence and concerns about the visibility of audience costs to foreign adversaries. This article engages with both concerns. I theorize that third-party diplomacy can help leaders signal their audience costs by corroborating their vulnerability to domestic punishment. I illustrate this mediated audience cost mechanism with an archival case study of Jordan–Israeli relations surrounding the 1966 Samu incident. I find that US crisis diplomacy helped Jordanian King Hussein to signal his vulnerability to a military coup d’état, and thus his resolve to retaliate against Israeli aggression, which in turn led Israel to refrain from further counterterror raids into the West Bank. The analysis integrates audience cost theory with crisis diplomacy in practice, and suggests several implications for future audience cost scholarship.

When Do Imposed Sanctions Work? The Role of Target Regime Type

A number of studies on sanction effectiveness have highlighted the importance of regime type and how it affects the sensitivity of sanctioned states (target) to the economic costs of sanctions. The scholarly consensus holds that mainly because of their responsiveness to domestic audiences, democratic regimes are most likely to give in to the demands of the sanctioning state (sender). I argue that regime type is important not only in influencing leaders’ sensitivity to economic costs—which create incentives to back down—but also to the audience costs—which create incentives to stand firm. I argue that taking the audience cost into account would lead to different predictions about the effect of democracy. Particularly, I argue that the effect of democracy is inverted- U shaped, where full democracies have no higher likelihood of meeting the demands of the sender than mixed (hybrid) regimes. Using a newly released dataset on economic sanctions between 1950-2020, I find robust support for my argument.

Symbolic Amplification and Suboptimal Weapons Procurement: Explaining Turkey’s S-400 Program

Turkey’s 2019 acquisition of Russian S-400 missile batteries is puzzling. Despite repeated threats of sanctions by the United States, North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Turkey purchased a multi-billion-dollar Russian air defense system that remains nonoperational, fails to cover Turkey’s air defense gap, and led to Turkey’s costly expulsion from the F-35 program. We argue unexpected domestic constraints created by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s symbolic diplomacy raised the political costs of backing away from the deal. Collecting data from media reports and interviews, we analyze how Turkey’s AKP wielded the S-400 as a weapons system legitimating an identity narrative of Turkey as regional counterhegemon, facilitating the cultivation of coalitions with multiple, often competing, constituencies. We demonstrate via process tracing how the inherent ambiguity of symbols allowed nationalist constituencies key to the AKP’s hold on power to amplify the S-400 as symbolic of Turkey’s sovereignty, trapping Turkish officials in a costly policy corner. In unpacking Turkey’s S-400 purchase, the article contributes to the literature on symbolic diplomacy, audience costs, weapons procurement, and deterrence failure.

Costs and Cover: Explaining the Onset of Ceasefires in Civil Conflict

Ceasefires are common in civil conflict. Yet we have surprisingly little comparative analysis of why and under what conditions they occur. A ceasefire provides temporary relief from the costs of conflict, but also generates its own costs. Building on this logic, we argue that conflict parties are more likely to accept the costs associated with a ceasefire when the conflict costs are greater, in particular, when: violence is intense; there are higher levels of ‘collateral damage’; and the parties lack international support. Second, we contend that ceasefires are also more likely in those periods in which the audience costs associated with entering into an arrangement are lower, specifically, when the parties have some form of ‘political cover’, such as during mediation. We find support for both arguments in an analysis of a new dataset capturing all ceasefire in civil conflict from 1989-2020, using a series of dyad fixed effect models.

Domestic constraints in crisis bargaining

This paper analyzes an agency model of crisis bargaining where two states have private information about war payoffs. In the model, two leaders bargain on behalf of their own states. Importantly, owing to political bias and audience costs, a leader’s war payoff and peace payoff differ from those of her state at large. I establish general results about leaders’ bargaining strategies and the possibility of peaceful resolution. By examining incentive compatibility constraints, I show that in any equilibrium that has zero probability of costly war, a leader’s payoff net of audience costs cannot vary with their private information. After that, I identify the size of resource necessary to appease both states. If this necessary condition holds, which is affected by political bias, there exist properly specified audience costs that guarantee peaceful bargaining outcomes.

The power of folk ideas in economic policy and the central bank–commercial bank analogy

ABSTRACT This article argues that policy-makers’ non-expert or ‘folk’ ideas can affect policy outcomes in a way that challenges the assumption of economic policy-making being guided by expert ideas emanating from the realm of economics and other sciences. To substantiate this argument, the article invokes literatures on audience costs as well as on economic folk theories to highlight the power of analogies and fallacies in the formulation of policy. While political economists have focused exclusively on the power of the ‘household analogy’ in the area of fiscal policy, much less is known about its monetary policy equivalent, which the article introduces as the ‘bank analogy’. Empirically, the analogy is assessed in the context of what is arguably a least likely case for the power of folk ideas to hold: the European Central Bank's governance of its balance sheet, the most powerful balance sheet in Europe.