What is the mechanism underlying audience costs? Incompetence, belligerence, and inconsistency
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319839456 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
What is the mechanism underlying
audience costs? Incompetence,
belligerence, and inconsistency
William G Nomikos
Department of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis
Nicholas Sambanis
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract
Audience cost theory posits that concern over the nation’s reputation pushes voters to sanction leaders who make
empty threats because they tarnish the nation’s honor. We question the empirical support for that theory. We show
that survey vignettes in the previous experimental literature conflate audience costs generated by inconsistency and
belligerence with approval losses arising from the perception that the leader is incompetent. These ‘incompetence
costs’ are due to leaders not achieving audiences’ preferred outcomes. Our article contributes to the literature on
audience costs by disentangling inconsistency and belligerence costs from incompetence costs, which we find are the
larger component of audience costs. We also make a methodological contribution: we show that experimental
designs in previous studies cannot test the different mechanisms; that previous estimates of audience costs are biased
because treatments affect respondents’ beliefs about the likely outcome of policy actions; and we suggest a new
experimental framework to estimate audience costs. Our results are consistent with arguments that audiences care
more about policy outcomes than about leaders’ inconsistency or belligerence during a crisis.
Keywords
audience costs, crisis bargaining, domestic politics and international relations, experiments, incompetence, interstate
conflict
Introduction
How do leaders engaged in a foreign policy crisis know if
their adversaries’ threats are to be taken seriously?
According to a prominent theory of international rela-
tions, threats are more credible when leaders face domes-
tic political audiences that increase leaders’ costs of
saying one thing and doing another. Audience costs are
the ‘price’ that a leader would pay for backing down after
making a public threat to escalate a dispute (Tomz,
2007: 821). These costs are thought to be generated
because voters feel that their leader has damaged the
nation’s honor by backing down (Fearon, 1994; Schultz,
2001; Guisinger & Smith, 2002); because voters disap-
prove of the aggressive nature of the leader’s threat
(Kertzer & Brutger, 2016); or because failure to follow
through on a threat is seen as a lack of competence
(Smith, 1998). Leaders in any political system could face
audience costs and should therefore think twice before
making empty threats (Weeks, 2008; Debs & Goemans,
2010; Dafoe & Weiss, 2018).
Yet audiences do not always punish leaders for incon-
sistent action. US President Barack Obama expressed
concern that Syrian President Bashir al-Assad would
employ chemical weapons in his fight against rebels in
the nascent civil war in Syria. On 12 August 2012,
Obama famously said that chemical weapons represented
‘a red line’ that would warrant more aggressive military
Corresponding author:
wnomikos@wustl.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 575–588
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319839456
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