Appeal to the Public: Domestic Evaluation and Public Statements in Vietnam War

• In Event: Leader-Based Approaches to International Conflict

Abstract

Do domestic audiences help the leaders send credible public signals? Crisis bargaining literature suggests that the presence of domestic audiences enhances the credibility of public messages. However, I argue that domestic audiences motivate the leaders to produce public statements with ambiguous signals. Once involved in a militarized crisis with another state, leaders are often concerned about the domestic evaluation of their conflict behavior in the crisis. To address this concern, leaders issue public statements because they believe that, through public messages, they can show the domestic constituents how they strive to resolve the crisis, reframe the issues at stake, and make a justification for political decisions they make in the crisis. Moreover, leaders strategically embrace ambiguity in their public words to satisfy broader audiences with heterogeneous preferences over the ways to manage the crisis. Applying supervised learning methods to declassified White House documents of the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1976, I find empirical support for the argument. The result indicates that the US policymakers are more likely to issue public statements with ambiguous rhetoric as they have concerns about negative assessments that the public makes about their conflict behavior. This implies that the presence of domestic audiences undermines the credibility of the state's public signals.

Author

• Yohan Park, Texas A&M University