Moving Crowds and Winning Crises: Anger, Audience Costs, and Signaling Resolve

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

Abstract

Existing work on crisis bargaining has typically used audience cost theory as a central mechanism to suggest that leaders can credibly signal their resolve by making public threats. This line of argument has led to findings that democracies are more likely to prevail in international crises. Yet recent experimental evidence shows that leaders can avoid audience costs of backing down from a threat. How do we reconcile these apparent conflicting findings? If leaders are able to evade audience costs, what explains the democratic advantage? I develop a hypothesis about crisis bargaining, which suggests that publicly expressing anger at the adversary increases the credibility of threats to use force because anger increases the audience cost of backing down for a leader. I test this claim using new hand-coded text data on public statements made by world leaders involved in bilateral crises between 1946 and 1996. I find a positive association between a favorable crisis outcome and an interaction between threat and anger, which suggests that expressions of anger can make public threats more effective. I also find that after controlling for threat, anger alone is positively associated with a higher probability of prevailing in an international crisis. These findings propose emotional rhetoric as a novel mechanism through which leaders can generate international credibility.

Author

• Hohyun Yoon, University of Pennsylvania