Untying Hands: De-escalation, Reputation, and Dynamic Audience Costs

Two states in a dispute refuse to back down. One ties its own hands to strengthen its stand and gain advantage; the other tries to untie the tied hands to preempt disadvantage. Tying hands is a well-studied strategy, but it tells only part of the story, and the response strategy of untying hands remains unexplored. Can a state untie the tied hands of its opponent to give freedom back to its opponent—the freedom to concede? I identify three strategies of untying hands: counterthreat, reassurance, and normative framing. I show experimentally that these strategies can reduce the public costs of backing down and the perceived reputational damage from backing down. Tied hands and audience costs are not static and immutable, but dynamic and malleable by the other side.

Audience Costs and the Credibility of Commitments

Threats and promises are prevalent in international relations (IR). However, deception is also a possibility in diplomacy. Why should one state believe that another state is not merely bluffing? How can a state credibly communicate its threats and promises to others? The IR scholarship suggests that one way by which a state may make its commitments credible is by generating audience costs—the political costs a leader suffers from publicly issuing a threat or promise and then failing to follow through. There is a broad and methodologically diverse literature on the existence, mechanisms, and effectiveness of audience costs. The concept of audience costs has also been applied to explain many phenomena in IR. This article examines the IR scholarship on audience costs across different methodological approaches, including qualitative case studies, large-N statistical tests, and survey experiments.

Making Sense of Japan’s Export Restrictions against South Korea

Why did Japanese Prime Minister Abe impose controversial export restrictions after rulings by the South Korean Supreme Court on wartime forced laborers? This article answers this question through the lens of domestic symbolism in economic sanctions studies. We argue that domestic political calculations led the Japanese government to adopt hawkish measures against South Korea. Abe wanted to ensure continued support from his constituents and to win the upcoming election. A series of political reforms since the early 1990s have empowered the prime minister and made LDP politicians pay more attention to public opinion than to factional topography. Strong anti-Korean sentiment among the Japanese public reduced the leadership’s concerns about the audience costs of economic countermeasures. Through an examination of the interplay among various domestic actors over the policy measure, this study provides insights on how domestic symbolism can serve as an origin of foreign policy decision-making in democracies.

Public Opinion and Crisis Behavior in a Nuclearized South Asia

Research on public opinion and crisis behavior has focused largely on pressures felt by leaders who have initiated a crisis, not on leaders in target states responding to adversary provocation. Our survey experiment involving 1,823 respondents in Punjab, Pakistan, finds public support for escalating rather than de-escalating in response to such provocation. It shows how public pressures can encourage conflict even in instances where a leader has engaged in no prior effort to generate audience costs following crisis onset. Survey respondents were more likely to support escalatory decisions if they were made by a military, rather than civilian, leader, although we do not find that military leaders receive more support in de-escalatory decisions. Finally, while we demonstrate that leaders can mitigate the costs of de-escalating by highlighting the dangers of conflict, they still incur opportunity costs in foregone public support when they opt to de-escalate rather than escalate a crisis.

Deniability in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime: The Upside of the Dual-Use Dilemma

Nuclear technology is often “dual-use,” having both peaceful and military applications. This is widely regarded as a lamentable fact, as states can pursue nuclear weapons under the guise of peaceful intentions. However, this article proposes an upside to the nuclear dual-use dilemma: the deniable nature of dual-use technology makes it more amenable to coercive counterproliferation. Caught proliferators are more likely to come into compliance if they can elude audience costs by denying that they were ever out of compliance. Thus, the dual-use dilemma is both the bane of the nonproliferation regime and a boon to its coercive enforcement. Poor knowledge of past nuclear programs can hamper future verification. Counterintuitively, however, the effectiveness of nonproliferation regime institutions created to promote transparency—the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—may be enhanced by not directly challenging the denial of past nuclear activities. This research uses interviews and archival evidence from the IAEA, US government, and South African apartheid government. At a time when ongoing nuclear disputes revolve around questions of transparency and admissions of guilt, this article contributes to scholarly and policy debates about secrecy, face-saving, counterproliferation strategy, and the role of international institutions in coercive bargaining.

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

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 accountable leaders greater leverage in crisis bargaining. We argue, contrary to the theory, that leaders are often unaware of audience costs and their impact on crisis bargaining. We emphasise the role of domestic opposition in undermining a foreign threat, note that opposition can emerge from policy disagreements within the governing party as well as from partisan oppositions, and argue that the resulting costs differ from audience costs. We argue that a leader's experience of audience costs can trigger learning about audience costs dynamics and alter future behaviour. We demonstrate the plausibility of these arguments through a case study of the 1863–4 Schleswig-Holstein crisis. Prime Minister Palmerston's threat against German intervention in the Danish dispute triggered a major domestic debate, which undercut the credibility of the British threat and contributed to both the failure of deterrence and to subsequent British inaction. Parliament formally censured Palmerston, contributing to a learning-driven reorientation in British foreign policy.

Audience, agenda setting, and issue salience in international negotiations

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.

Military Alliances and Public Support for War

How do military alliances affect public support for war to defend victims of aggression? We offer the first experimental evidence on this fundamental question. Our experiments revealed that alliance commitments greatly increased the American public's willingness to intervene abroad. Alliances shaped public opinion by increasing public fears about the reputational costs of nonintervention and by heightening the perceived moral obligation to intervene out of concerns for fairness and loyalty. Finally, although alliances swayed public opinion across a wide range of circumstances, they made the biggest difference when the costs of intervention were high, the stakes of intervention were low, and the country needing aid was not a democracy. Thus, alliances can create pressure for war even when honoring the commitment would be extremely inconvenient, which could help explain why democratic allies tend to be so reliable. These findings shed new light on the consequences of alliances and other international legal commitments, the role of morality in foreign policy, and ongoing debates about domestic audience costs.

Trade Rage: Audience Costs and International Trade

Politicians frequently issue public threats to manipulate tariffs but only sometimes follow through. This behavior theoretically ought to generate audience costs. We therefore test the validity of audience costs in trade war settings through a vignette-based survey experiment. The vignettes describe a hypothetical situation involving the U.S. and a second country (China, Canada, or unspecified) with whom the U.S. has a trade deficit. The president (Democrat, Republican, or unspecified) either maintains the status quo, threatens to impose tariffs and backs down, or threatens to impose tariffs and follows through. Our findings highlight differences between security and trade conflict when it comes to audience costs and presidential approval. While Americans sanction the president for issuing a threat to raise tariffs, they generally support backing down. Regression modeling and text analysis of a free response question from our surveys suggest this is because consumers are wary of paying the costs of tariffs.

When Does Talk Become Costly?

Chapter 3 provides the theoretical framework for the central argument of this book—that China’s sanctions rhetoric has had a palpable impact on its behaviour. It shows how the fear of incurring ‘international audience costs’ drives certain aspects of states’ foreign policy behaviour. It discusses the conditions that need to be in place for the international audience cost theory to work—i.e. the offending state needs to care about international opinion, and a rhetorical actor must be present to draw attention to the differences between an offending state’s rhetoric and behaviour. It then applies this theoretical framework to China and examines why and how international audience costs is a crucial mechanism that provides the link between China’s sanctions rhetoric and its behaviour.