In this book, first published in 2001, Kenneth Schultz explores the effects of democratic politics on the use and success of coercive diplomacy. He argues that open political competition between the government and opposition parties influences the decision to use threats in international crises, how rival states interpret those threats, and whether or not crises can be settled short of war. The relative transparency of their political processes means that, while democratic governments cannot easily conceal domestic constraints against using force, they can also credibly demonstrate resolve when their threats enjoy strong domestic support. As a result, compared to their non-democratic counterparts, democracies are more selective about making threats, but those they do make are more likely to be successful - that is, to gain a favorable outcome without resort to war. Schultz develops his argument through a series of game-theoretic models and tests the resulting hypothesis using both statistical analyses and historical case studies.

r his article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises. It combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two-party electoral choice. One state has two strategic actors-a government and an opposition party-both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo. The rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals. The parties' payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate. The model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state's preferences. This finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict, since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries, which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation.

How do domestic political institutions affect the way states interact in international crises? In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion of interest in this question, thanks largely to the well-known claim that democratic states do not fight wars with one another. Work on the “democratic peace” has generated a number of theoretical arguments about how practices, values, and institutions associated with democracy might generate distinctive outcomes. Although the level of interest in this topic has focused much-needed attention on the interaction between domestic and international politics, the proliferation of competing explanations for a single observation is not entirely desirable. Progress in this area requires that researchers devise tests not only to support different causal stories but also to discriminate between them.

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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 direct evidence (1) that escalating a crisis and then backing down jeopardizes a leader's tenure in office, and (2) that democratic leaders are more vulnerable to removal in this event than are nondemocratic leaders. Tests that seek to measure the existence and magnitude of audience costs encounter severe problems of partial observability and strategic selection: the effect of audience costs on a leader's political survival can only be detected by looking at cases in which the costs are actually incurred, but strategic choice implies that the probability of incurring audience costs is a function of their value. A formal model, brief case studies, and Monte Carlo simulations are used to show that these problems bias direct tests against supporting either of the audience cost propositions. Tests based on observed audience costs understate both the mean level of audience costs in the full population and the difference in means across regime types.