How Leaders' Anger Makes Threats More Credible

📌 The Puzzle and Argument

Leaders' public displays of anger are a previously underappreciated source of coercive credibility. Anger expressions make threats appear more credible because targets infer that angry leaders are less sensitive to the costs of conflict, and therefore more likely to follow through on threats.

📊 Tracking Anger in Crisis Statements, 1946–1996

• Quantitative analysis of a novel dataset capturing world leaders' public statements during international crises from 1946 to 1996.
• Measurements record leaders' emotional expressions over time and space to link anger cues to crisis outcomes.

🧪 A U.S.-Based Survey Experiment Tests the Mechanism

• A controlled experiment presents target audiences with angry versus non-angry threats.
• The experiment isolates whether anger causally changes targets' inferences about resolve and cost sensitivity.

📌 Key Findings

• Observational evidence: Anger expressions increase the likelihood that a threat will succeed in international crises.
• Experimental evidence: Anger causes targets to infer greater resolve and lower sensitivity to conflict costs.
• Non-angry threats show little credibility and can even backfire, reducing the threat's effectiveness.

⚖️ Why This Matters

These results identify a unique emotional source of coercive credibility and underscore the crucial role of emotions in international relations. The combination of a historical, cross-national text dataset and a targeted experiment clarifies both the empirical relationship and the cognitive mechanism linking leaders' anger to successful coercion.