Audience Costs, Information, and Credible Commitment Problems

Abstract

Leaders who can accumulate audience costs can send costly signals that may help alleviate information problems associated with crisis escalation. We argue that research examining the effect of audience costs fails to appreciate the theoretical context in which audience costs matter. Audience costs may help alleviate information problems associated with international conflict. However, credible commitment problems are more central than information problems for some international conflicts. Theory does not expect audience costs to matter in this context; as a result, extant tests, and many criticisms, of the effect of audience costs on crisis escalation are flawed. We offer a more appropriate test of the effect of audience costs on crisis escalation. Consistent with extant theoretical arguments, we find that audience costs only reduce the likelihood of conflict when credible commitment problems are not the dominant concern motivating a dispute or crisis.

The Interaction Effects of Bargaining Power: The Interplay Between Veto Power, Asymmetric Interdependence, Reputation, and Audience Costs

“… For further influences on the size of audience costs see Levendusky and Horowitz (). For critiques on the audience costs argument in general see Snyder and Borghard () and Moon and Souva (), and with regard to democracies and autocracies see Weeks () and Kinne and Marinov ().…”

Audience costs, domestic economy and coercive diplomacy

“…As a result, such leaders should be even more able to make their threats credible and, therefore, are more likely to be successful in coercive diplomacy. This novel prediction finds no empirical support in a replication study using Moon and Souva (2016). I discuss possible reasons for this result and avenues for further research.…”

“…Using the MCT data, Moon and Souva (2016) successfully recover the association between audience costs and coercive diplomacy in those disputes caused by information asymmetry. 3 Their dependent variable is threat failure, coded 1 if a threat fails and 0 if a threat succeeds.…”

“…3 Their dependent variable is threat failure, coded 1 if a threat fails and 0 if a threat succeeds. Moon and Souva (2016) use the Audience Cost Capacity Index (Uzonyi et al, 2012) to measure the sensitivity of regimes to audience costs. They dichotomize this index into high versus low audience cost capacities.…”

Power, territory, and interstate conflict

“…The idea that territory and territorial claims between states can provide an avenue to test implications of bargaining models can be traced back to Fearon (1995: 408), where he highlights the importance of strategic territory in bargaining interactions. The role of territory has recently received renewed focus as a way to test the implications of the bargaining model (Carter, 2010; Moon and Souva, 2016; Rider and Owsiak, 2016). By embedding the argument here within Powell’s theoretical model, the hypotheses tested here also serve as a novel test of his influential theory.…”