James Fearon’s “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes” is arguably one of the most influential articles in International Relations. This article takes stock of the enterprise of audience costs theory (ACT) by providing a “quasi-meta-analysis” of the case studies (QMACS) for ACT based on an explicit Bayesian logic. I show that overall evidence for ACT has been quite thin, whereas evidence against it has been quite powerful. While audience costs do exist, they are much more contingent, and their magnitude is much smaller than what ACT’s proponents have believed. Because audience costs are only one possible pathway that links domestic politics with states’ international behavior, and domestic politics is far messier than proponents of ACT are willing to admit, overselling audience costs is unwarranted. To better understand the relationships between domestic politics and international behaviors, we need to move beyond audience costs and bring in other mechanisms. By synthesizing different case studies scattered in the literature with an explicit Bayesian logic, QMACS provides a new tool for disciplining and synthesizing case studies regarding other prominent theories such as democratic peace, extended deterrence, inequality and democratic transitions, and revolution.
Shiping Tang (Fri,) studied this question.