Exporting Audience Costs to Other Fields: Economic Sanctions and Intervention

• In Event: Forms of Foreign Intervention and its Consequences

Abstract

Audience costs is a powerful theory to account for the implications of the threat of the use of force in democracies and the public support penalties a government leader may incur for escalating a foreign policy crisis and then backing down. Over the past decade, scholarly research has focused on dispositional and situational factors contributing to audience costs: the role of institutional and contextual factors (Tomz 2007); the level of escalation (Tomz 2007; Trager and Vavreck 2011); the motivation to punish a leader (Tomz, 2007) as well as the justifications offered by her or him (Levendusky and Horowitz 2011); the role of partisanship (Levendusky and Horowitz 2011; Trager and Vavreck 2011) and of political opposition (Levendusky and Horowitz 2011); the moderating effect of individual predisposition toward the use of military force (Kertzer and Brutger 2016) and the kind of policy outcome eventually produced (Chaudion 2014). Our study adds to the literature on audience costs exploring two aspects so far neglected in the attempt to account for its generalizability. The first is whether the theory holds also when the wielded threat is not about the use of military force, but about economic sanctions. The second aspect is about the potential audience costs of not fulfilling an assurance, that is, a promise not to do something. Both issues have become timely over the Trump administration since the Republican president has both used explicit threats in the economic field (e.g. announcing trade sanctions against foreign countries) and in at least one opportunity done something he clearly had committed himself not to do (i.e. intervening militarily in Syria). By means of survey experiments conducted on a sample of US population we find that both assurances and threats produce a domestic price though this seem to depend on the outcome of the conflict. Moreover, while audience costs extend to trade disputes, differences can be drawn with respect to the interaction between types of promises and policy outcomes across security and economic conflicts. Moreover, the paper explores whether populist attitudes and foreign policy postures moderates those relationships.

Authors

• Pierangelo Isernia, Università di Siena

• Sergio Martini, University of Siena