Audience, agenda setting, and issue salience in international negotiations
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00108367211000784 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211000784
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(4) 472 –490
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211000784
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Audience, agenda setting,
and issue salience in
international negotiations
Holger Janusch
Abstract
A theoretical gap in the audience cost theory is the missing analysis of its central feature: the
audience. This article defines the audience as a group composed of individuals and societal actors
that can punish a government and pay attention to the issue being negotiated. Thus, the audience
can vary depending on the issue salience. When the issue salience is low, the audience comprises
just interest groups and the attentive public. Yet, the higher the issue salience, the more voters
of the general public also become part of the audience. The audience’s composition in turn
determines the level of the audience costs. Because the general public tends to evaluate national
honor more highly, be less informed and have less well-defined preferences than interest groups
and the attentive public, the audience costs should be higher when the issue salience is high.
Furthermore, the audience can take actions that prevent the effect of audience costs or generate
exogenous audience costs.
Keywords
agenda setting, attentive public, audience cost, conflict resolution, international negotiations,
issue framing
Introduction
In the 1990s, Fearon (1994, 1995, 1997) developed the audience cost theory to explain
wars from a rationalist perspective. Wars are seen as a result of signaling problems.
Political leaders can generate costly signals by making public threats. Because they
would suffer costs ex post from their domestic constituency should they retreat from
these threats, political leaders can tie their own hands. Threats, therefore, are not just
cheap talk. Audience costs will lead to a bargaining failure if they exceed the threatener’s
costs for escalation but the threatened party sees a threat still as non-credible (Fearon,
Corresponding author:
Holger Janusch, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of
English, American, and Celtic Studies, North American Studies Program, Regina-Pacis-Weg 5, 53113 Bonn,
Germany.
Email: hjanusch@uni-bonn.de
1000784CAC0010.1177/00108367211000784Cooperation and ConflictJanusch
research-article2021
Article
Janusch 473
1994, 1995; Slantchev, 2005). While audience cost theory has sparked controversial
debates in International Relations, especially research on peace, conflict resolution, and
bargaining, interestingly, the definition of its central feature—the audience—has been
neglected for the most part in the debates about audience costs. First, it is often unclear
who comprises the audience or it is simply assumed that the audience is equal to the
selectorate, which means the set of people who have an institutional say in choosing the
government (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003). Second, the audience is often seen as some
kind of non-actor who constrains the behavior of the political leadership without taking
any direct actions during the bargaining (for a review, see Section 2).
This article makes a theoretical contribution to the debate on audience costs by focus-
ing on its centerpiece: the audience. The article develops a comprehensive theoretical
approach by reviewing research on audience costs, agenda setting, and issue salience.
The approach can be used to analyze complex individual cases, without denying the use
of parsimonious theories that are based on an abstract definition of the audience.
Nonetheless, the theoretical discussions and developments made here can be helpful for
all scholars focused on audience costs, including advocates of parsimonious theories.
First, a closer analytical look at the audience promotes a better understanding of audi-
ence costs, their causes and effects. Thereby, it can inspire scholars to new ideas about
audience costs. Second, the theoretical insights can provide explanations for deviations
in empirical studies. The developed hypotheses can be integrated into other theoretical
models and, thereby, strengthen their explanatory power. For example, empirical cases
that seem to contradict the audience costs argument might just be attributed to the non-
consideration of issue salience. Third, the theoretical insights call attention to the poten-
tial over- or underestimation of the effects of audience costs. For example, surveys that
only ask voters to prove audience costs might (implicitly) overestimate the potential
effects of audience costs by neglecting that the general public is not always part and even
if only one part of the audience.
Fourth, in contrast to the usual argument that the audience cares about national honor
or reputation, the article provides an alternative explanation for the audience’s motiva-
tion to punish a government for backing down. Because it takes into account the sub-
stance of a policy, but still explains how public threats can impose costs ex post on
governments for backing down, it avoids the often criticized assumption that the audi-
ence is more interested in inconsistency between words and deeds than in the substance.
Therefore, the alternative explanation still comes to the same basic conclusion as the
audience cost theory but refers to different causal mechanisms—agenda setting and issue
framing instead of national honor—and helps to identify different constraints of audi-
ence costs.
For the explanation of the audience’s composition and its effects on the size of the
audience costs, the article links audience cost theory with research on attentive public,
issue salience, and agenda setting. The theoretical arguments will be backed up by refer-
ring to studies in the mentioned research fields. To be clear, the developed arguments are
not limited to crisis bargaining. They can be transferred to international negotiations in
all issue areas. The second section presents the literature gap in relation to audience
costs, that is, the missing definition of the audience. In the third section, the audience will
be defined and separated from the selectorate. The composition of the audience will be
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