D.M. Gibler and M.L. Hutchison. Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The Importance of Issue Salience. Paper.
Abstract: Democratic leaders are thought to be prone to domestic sanction following defeats or changed policies, and these audience costs should allow democracies to better signal their intentions during public disputes. Empirical tests have previously provided strong support for this relationship. However, we argue that democracies face a different agenda of contentious issues compared to other regime types. Democracies rarely have territorial issues, which is an issue that is highly salient and likely to escalate to war. This allows democratic leaders to carefully choose the crises over which they will try to bargain and generate audience costs. Empirical tests that do not control for this type of selection process are likely to produce biased results. Our tests confirm this selection argument in multiple contexts. We re-estimate the findings of Schultz (2001) and test the expectations of Fearon (1994) using dispute data from 1816 to 2001 as well as incident-level data from 1993 to 2001. Our findings suggest that democratic challenges over territorial issues fare no better (and often worse) than non-democratic challenges. Territorial issues are much (1) more likely to be reciprocated, 1816 to 2001. These tests are the first use of the within-dispute incident data and suggest that territorial disputes have (2) a greater number of incidents and (3) escalations, and (4) force more challengers to back down. Any regime differences in our tests generally suggest a disadvantage for democratic challengers over these issues. We discuss the importance of these findings for both the audience cost and territorial issue literatures.
Abstract: Democratic leaders are thought to be prone to domestic sanction following defeats or changed policies, and these audience costs should allow democracies to better signal their intentions during public disputes. Empirical tests have previously provided strong support for this relationship. However, we argue that democracies face a different agenda of contentious issues compared to other regime types. Democracies rarely have territorial issues, which is an issue that is highly salient and likely to escalate to war. This allows democratic leaders to carefully choose the crises over which they will try to bargain and generate audience costs. Empirical tests that do not control for this type of selection process are likely to produce biased results. Our tests confirm this selection argument in multiple contexts. We re-estimate the findings of Schultz (2001) and test the expectations of Fearon (1994) using dispute data from 1816 to 2001 as well as incident-level data from 1993 to 2001. Our findings suggest that democratic challenges over territorial issues fare no better (and often worse) than non-democratic challenges. Territorial issues are much (1) more likely to be reciprocated, 1816 to 2001. These tests are the first use of the within-dispute incident data and suggest that territorial disputes have (2) a greater number of incidents and (3) escalations, and (4) force more challengers to back down. Any regime differences in our tests generally suggest a disadvantage for democratic challengers over these issues. We discuss the importance of these findings for both the audience cost and territorial issue literatures.