The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound

@article{Snyder2011TheCO,
  title={The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound},
  author={Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard},
  journal={American Political Science Review},
  year={2011},
  volume={105},
  pages={437 - 456}
}
A large literature in political science takes for granted that democratic leaders would pay substantial domestic political costs for failing to carry out the public threats they make in international crises, and consequently that making threats substantially enhances their leverage in crisis bargaining. And yet proponents of this audience costs theory have presented very little evidence that this causal mechanism actually operates in real—as opposed to simulated—crises. We look for such… 
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208 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
8
Background Citations
54
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
5

208 Citations

Politics, audience costs, and signalling: Britain and the 1863–4 Schleswig-Holstein crisis

Abstract Audience costs theory posits that domestic audiences punish political leaders who make foreign threats but fail to follow through, and that anticipation of audience costs gives more…

Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory

According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie…

Expectation Costs in International Disputes: How Words Work Like Tanks for Accountable Leaders

Recent theorizing has emphasized that military mobilizations both sink costs and tie hands, unlike signaling strategies that rely solely on punishments for bluffing, like audience costs. I argue that…

The conditional effect of audiences on credibility

How do leaders signal their intentions during a crisis? Scholars point to audience costs, potential political punishment for bluffing during bargaining, to explain how accountable leaders…

Looking for Audience Costs in all the Wrong Places: Electoral Institutions, Media Access, and Democratic Constraint

For leaders to generate credibility through audience costs, there must be mechanisms in place that enable citizens to learn about foreign policy failures. However, scholars have paid relatively…

Does it Matter if Autocracies Can Generate Audience Costs?

Theories of audience costs are a relatively new phenomenon within international relations, with Fearon (1994) arguing that democracies are able to generate audience costs and thereby are seen to be…

Backing Out or Backing In? Commitment and Consistency in Audience Costs Theory

Audience costs theory posits that domestic publics punish leaders for making an external threat and then backing down. One key mechanism driving this punishment involves the value the public places…

Outcomes and Audience Costs in an Incentivized Laboratory Experiment

This paper presents a laboratory experiment examining how citizens' concern for their country's international reputation affects how they evaluate leaders. A large experimental literature has found…

Detecting Audience Costs in International Crises ∗

We present observational evidence of audience costs. Selection effects in crisis bargaining make it difficult to directly observe audience costs because when state leaders anticipate larger audience…

Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The Importance of Issue Salience

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…
...

References

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The methodological issues that arise in testing Fearon's argument about domestic political audience costs and signaling in international crises are examined, in particular the difficulty of finding…

Politicians, the Media, and Domestic Audience Costs

Domestic audience costs can help leaders establish credible commitments by tying their hands. Most studies assume these costs without explaining how they arise. I link domestic audience costs to the…

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International crises are modeled as a political “war of attrition” in which state leaders choose at each moment whether to attack, back down, or escalate. A leader who backs down suffers audience…

Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve

Scholars of international relations usually argue that democracies are better able to signal their foreign policy intentions than nondemocracies, in part because democracies have an advantage in…

The (Non-) Partisan Logic of Audience Costs

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