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Do democracies make more effective coercive threats? An influential literature in international relations argues that democratic institutions allow leaders to credibly signal their resolve in crises, thereby making their threats more likely to work than threats by nondemocracies+ This article revisits the quantitative evidence for this proposition, which we call the "democratic credibility hypothesis," and finds that it is surprisingly weak+ Close examination of the data sets most commonly used to test this hypothesis reveals that they contain few successful democratic threats, or indeed threats of any kind+ Moreover, these data sets' outcome variables do not properly measure the effectiveness of threats, and therefore yield misleading results+ The article then reassesses the democratic credibility hypothesis using the Militarized Compellent Threats data set, a new data set designed specifically to test hypotheses about the effectiveness of coercive threats+ The analysis indicates that threats from democracies are no more successful than threats from other states+ It is commonly argued in international relations scholarship that coercive threats issued by democracies are more successful than those issued by nondemocracies+ 1 According to this view, democratic leaders who issue threats in crises and thenThe order of the authors is alphabetical and reflects equal contributions+ For helpful comments on previous drafts we thank Dale

Despite normative and legal injunctions against targeting civilians in war, as well as doubts regarding the effectiveness of such strategies, belligerents have frequently turned their guns on noncombatants. Two variables—desperation to win and to save lives on one's own side in protracted wars of attrition, and the intention to conquer and annex enemy territory—explain this repeated resort to civilian targeting. According to the desperation logic, costly and prolonged wars of attrition cause states to become increasingly anxious to prevail and to reduce their losses. Adopting a policy of civilian victimization permits states to continue the war while managing their losses and hopefully coercing the adversary to quit. In the appetite for conquest model, by contrast, belligerents specifically intend to seize and annex territory. Attackers in this model employ civilian victimization to eliminate enemy civilians, who can threaten the aggressor's immediate military position and present a future threat of rebellion. Multivariate analysis of interstate wars between 1816 and 2003 corroborates the importance of these factors,and a case study of the British starvation blockade of Germany in World War I supports the plausibility of the desperation mechanism.

Proponents of the selection effects argument claim that because democratic leaders run a higher risk of losing office than autocratic leaders if they fail to win wars, they are more careful than their authoritarian counterparts in choosing which wars to initiate. The robust marketplace of ideas in democracies also weeds out self-serving or ill-conceived policies and allows democratic leaders to better estimate the chances of victory. Democracies, according to this logic, tend to pick on weak or vulnerable opponents and thus win a disproportionate number of the wars they start. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence, however, challenges this conclusion. The statistical correlation between democracy and victory is not robust to reasonable alternative choices for analyzing the data. In particular, including draws as a war outcome renders statistically insignificant the finding that democratic initiators and targets are more likely to win. In addition, democratic leaders who initiate wars should be optimistic that they will win, but process tracing of the decision by Lyndon Johnson's administration to escalate the Vietnam War (one of these omitted draws) reveals that top officials knew at the time that escalation promised a costly, protracted stalemate, yet they chose to fight anyway. Moreover, domestic politics, if anything, contributed to Johnson's decision to fight in Vietnam despite the poor odds of victory because he believed that pulling out would spark a backlash and destroy his Great Society legislative program. The results of this combined analysis raise doubts about the democracy and victory thesis, and should prompt interest in other explanatory variables for military effectiveness.

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