Audience Cost or Posturing Premium? How Empty Threats Work in Small Countries

• In Event: Resolve, Threats, Blame, and Audience Costs

Abstract

When leaders make foreign policy threats, how do allies and adversaries know whether to take them seriously? One longstanding explanation in political science is that leaders pay a domestic political cost for backing down from threats, thus lending such commitments credibility. In contrast with global powers, we argue that the leaders of many countries are not typically faced with audience costs and instead may garner a ``posturing premium'' by making nationalist-invoking threats that they later back down from. Knowing that their country does not have the military or economic power to follow through with such threats, citizens of small powers do not see backing down from unrealistic threats as a negative. At the same time, they appreciate a leader who stands up for national pride through bluster.


We test this theory in four Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam – that are in conflict with China and each other over ownership of and access to islands and atolls in the South China Sea. Using a series of survey experiments, we find that in contrast with the traditional audience cost findings, leaders in these countries are rewarded politically for making blustery threats against their neighbors or against China that they back down, relative to taking no action. The results are consistent across all four countries, which is notable because they range in regime type from single party authoritarianism to multi-party democracy. The results are robust to varying the target of the threat, wording of the vignette.Testing mechanisms, we find that the effects we find in all four Southeast Asian countries are driven especially by citizens with high nationalism. We also find evidence that respondents who are especially cognizant of their country’s limited foreign policy agency are more rewarding towards the leader for posturing.

Authors

• Renard J Sexton, Emory University

• Nico Ravanilla, University of California San Diego