Hawkishness and The Credibility of Foreign Threats: A Experimental Study

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security I

Abstract

The literature on signaling intentions to foreign states in international politics often suggests that domestic leaders often take into consideration an audience cost, a reputational cost they would suffer if they do not honor their words , thereby making their foreign policy promises credible to other countries. Recent developments in the literature, particularly that of Kertzer and Brutger (2016) and Brutger and Kertzer (2018), showed that assessment of audience costs is conditioned by the personal characteristics of the public, with hawks more likely to assess audience costs than doves. Their theoretical improvements are helpful for thinking about how hawkishness of a state’s public could help a state to better signal its resolve to other states in a foreign policy crisis. Because Hawks are better are making sure that their leaders pay a price for eating their own words, we hypothesize that a signal sent out by a state on behalf of a hawkish population will be more likely to be perceived as credible by the public in the target state. To examine this hypothesis, we will conduct a survey experiment to examine if foreign policy threats from leaders of a hawkish population overseas are seen as more trustworthy among the US public.

Authors

• Anthony Pierucci, Purdue University

• Kuan-Sheng Wu, Purdue University