Still Looking for Audience Costs

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Erik Gartzke is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego. Yonatan Lupu is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, beginning 2013. The authors contributed equally to this article, and their names are listed alphabetically. Notes James D. Fearon, "Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes," American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (September 1994): 577–92. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam III, "Democracy, War Initiation, and Victory," American Political Science Review 92, no. 2 (June 1998): 377–89. Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2003). Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "An Institutional Explanation for the Democratic Peace," American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (December 1999): 791–807. Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard, "The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound," American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (August 2011): 437–56; Marc Trachtenberg, "Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis," Security Studies (2012). John Gerring, "What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?" American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (May 2004): 341–54; John Gerring, "Causation: A Unified Framework for the Social Sciences," Journal of Theoretical Politics 17, no. 2 (2005): 163–98; Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, Dustin Tingley, and Teppei Yamamoto, "Unpacking the Black Box of Causality: Learning about Causal Mechanisms from Experimental and Observational Studies," American Political Science Review 105, no. 5 (November 2011): 765–89. The claim that a theory is hard to prove should never stand as an adequate defense of the theory, since disprovability is an important quality of theory itself. Audience cost theory can, should and has been criticized for the limited scope of available empirical support. For recent examples of these critiques, see Alexandre B. Downes and Todd S. Sechser. 2012. "The Illusion of Democratic Credibility." International Organization 66(3): 457–89, and Douglas Gibler and Marc L. Hutchinson. 2011. "Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The Importance of Issue Salience." Typescript: University of Alabama. Our concern here, however, is with the flawed nature of critiques that use the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. If academic audiences have failed to be sufficiently critical of audience cost theory in the past, it does not follow that readers should now be more credulous about the validity of such criticisms. Joe Eyerman and Robert A. Hart, Jr., "An Empirical Test of the Audience Cost Proposition: Democracy Speaks Louder than Words," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (December 1996): 597–616. Peter J. Partell and Glenn Palmer, "Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes," International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1999): 389–405. Christopher Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, "Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crisis, 1918–94," American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001): 633–47. Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Downes and Sechser, "The Illusion of Democratic Credibility." Kenneth A. Schultz, "Looking for Audience Costs," Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 1 (February 2001): 32–60. Fearon, "Domestic Political Audiences," 578. Jessica L. Weeks, "Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve," International Organization 62, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 35–64. See, for example, Downes and Sechser, "The Illusion of Democratic Credibility." See, for example, Schultz, "Looking for Audience Costs." Consider the "gold standard" for quantitative causal inference: the randomized drug trial. Such a research design is well suited to determining whether treatment with a particular drug causes a change in patients' symptoms. It cannot determine, however, how the drug caused that effect. For a similar argument, see Snyder and Borghard, "The Cost of Empty Threats." Imai et al., "Unpacking the Black Box of Causality," 785. Trachtenberg, "Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis"; Snyder and Borghard, "The Cost of Empty Threats." See generally Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2005). Trachtenberg, "Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis," 3. Neither Trachtenberg nor Snyder and Borghard examine cases where audience costs are discussed but rejected as an option. Although Gerring argues convincingly that case studies can be useful when we are more interested in learning about a causal mechanism than a causal effect, he does not offer solutions to the issues specific to testing audience cost theory that we have raised. Gerring, "Causation." Harry Eckstein, "Case Studies in Political Science," in Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 1, Political Science: Scope and Theory, ed. Fred Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, ma: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 79–138. Unfortunately, both sets of authors are explicit about their case selection process, but neither is explicit regarding their research design. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). On "information shortcuts," see Samuel L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Branislav L. Slantchev, "Politicians, the Media, and Domestic Audience Costs," International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 2006): 445–77; Matthew A. Baum and Philip B.K. Potter, "The Relationships Between Mass Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis," Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 39–65. Slantchev, "Politicians, the Media, and Domestic Audience Costs." Philip B.K. Potter and Matthew A. Baum, "Democratic Peace, Democratic Audience Costs, and Political Communication," Political Communication 27 (2010): 453–70. Michael Tomz, "Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach," International Organization 61, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 821–40; Matthew S. Levendusky and Michael C. Horowitz, "When Backing Down Is the Right Decision," Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (April 2012): 323–38.