Abstract
Audience-cost theory suggests that domestic publics can discipline leaders in international crises, but it remains unclear whether citizens punish leaders for belligerence itself. We reassess this question by examining belligerence costs, the penalty domestic audiences impose on leaders for choosing military engagement rather than staying out (Kertzer and Brutger 2016). We first conduct a meta-analysis of 27 survey experiments and find no evidence of a generally applicable belligerence-cost effect: engagement is punished in some studies, rewarded in others, and often has no discernible effect. We then develop a formal model in which citizens evaluate belligerence based on beliefs about whether restraint was feasible and force was necessary. The framework helps explain context-specific variation in the effects of belligerence across studies. We argue that domestic constraints on military escalation are more contingent than often assumed: publics do not punish belligerence per se; they punish belligerence that appears avoidable or unjustified.
Citation
Takei, Makito, and Yusaku Horiuchi. n.d. “Belligerence Audience Costs, Benefits, or None?.” Working paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7104358