This study asks whether citizens in a target country perceive audience costs in a threatening challenger state and whether the challenger’s regime type (democracy vs. dictatorship) affects that perception. Using a pre-registered survey experiment conducted in the United States, the authors test whether audiences abroad recognize that a leader who would suffer domestic backlash for backing down can send a more credible threat.
Pre-registered survey experiment US sample N = 1404 Perceived audience costs do not vary by challenger regime type
Data and methods
The authors report a pre-registered survey experiment run in the United States with a sample of respondents (N = 1404). The experiment manipulates signals about a challenger state’s domestic audience costs and the challenger’s regime type (democratic or dictatorial) and measures how respondents in the target country perceive the challenger’s credibility and the emergence of audience costs.
Main findings
Respondents in the United States were able to detect the emergence of audience costs in a challenger state, consistent with the idea that target audiences can see when challengers have domestic incentives that make threats costly to retract. The authors also report that the perceived magnitude of those audience costs—or the perceived credibility of the threat—did not differ between democratic and dictatorial challengers in their experiment.
- US respondents recognized audience costs when they were presented as present in the challenger.
- No detectable difference in perceived audience costs or threat credibility between democratic and autocratic challengers.
Interpretation and caveats
The authors frame these results as evidence that audiences in a target state can see audience costs as a potential signal, and they note that, in this experimental setting, regime type did not change that perception. All claims are described within the limits of the reported pre-registered survey experiment among US respondents.
