Domestic Institutions and Credible Signals

Audience costs are a central feature of many prominent theories of international conflict. We advance the understanding of audience costs by specifying the domestic institutions necessary to generate them. In our conceptualization, audience cost capacity (ACC) is a function of the availability of al...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational studies quarterly Vol. 56; no. 4; pp. 765 - 776
Main Authors Uzonyi, Gary, Souva, Mark, Golder, Sona N.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2012
Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Subjects
Audiences
Autocracy
Capacity costs
Concept Formation
Conceptualization
Conflict
Conflicts
Cost
Cost functions
Costs
Democracy
Incumbents
International Conflict
International conflicts
International relations
International studies
Political institutions
Political parties
Political Systems
Political theory
Polities
Reciprocatory motion
Transaction costs
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Summary:Audience costs are a central feature of many prominent theories of international conflict. We advance the understanding of audience costs by specifying the domestic institutions necessary to generate them. In our conceptualization, audience cost capacity (ACC) is a function of the availability of alternative rulers and the cost of mobilizing against the incumbent. This conceptualization leads to the first measure of ACC that has variation between more and less democratic political systems and variation within autocracies. We subject our measure to a rigorous set of tests that includes addressing selection effects and temporal treatment effects, neither of which have been fully examined in this research area. The empirical analysis offers strong support for the validity of our measure.
Bibliography:Author's note: We would like to thank James Morrow, Brandon Prins, Christopher Reenock, Allan Stam, and Jana von Stein for valuable feedback at various stages of this project. We presented previous versions of this paper at the Peace Science (International) Association, Binghamton University, and the Midwest Political Science Association. Replication material for all tables in the paper and the online appendix are available at http://mailer.fsu.edu/~msouva/research.htm.
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ISSN:0020-8833
1468-2478
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00746.x