Threat Construction and Coercive Credibility

Abstract

How do actors issue credible threats during international crises? While scholarship has traditionally focused on how the context of threats influences credibility, this paper considers how the construction of the threat itself affects credibility. More specifically, this paper introduces the concept of threat justification and theorize how the choice of explanation a leader uses in communicating her threats can influence her coercive credibility. This study employs a conjoint design survey experiment to identify the influence of threat specificity and severity, public versus private threats, and threat justification on perceptions of credibility. This paper finds that more precise threats are perceived as more credible, while threats employing reputational justifications are less credible. There is a minimal amount of evidence that the public versus private delivery of a threat influences credibility. This paper also finds that perceptions of credibility are influenced by whether the audience is domestic versus international and by the severity of the instigating crisis trigger. This study furthers our understanding of the factors shaping coercive credibility and how policymakers can most effectively convey their commitments during international crises.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jeff Berejikian, Guy Grossman, Rick Herrmann, Max Margulies, Carla Martinez Machain, Brian Rathbun, Jennifer Spindel, Clayton Webb, and participants at the University of Virginia Experiments Workshop, the University of Georgia’s Comparative Politics and International Relations Workshop, the 2019 and 2021 ISA Annual Meetings, the 2020 APSA Annual Meeting, and the 2020 ISA Midwest Annual Meeting for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Colgate University and the American Political Science Association provided financial support for this project. Colgate’s IRB (ER-S19-01) approved this survey. Portions of this study were pre-registered with the UPenn Wharton Credibility Lab (PAP #56014). Replication data and the online appendix are available through the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JPNUYY.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (1994): 597–616; James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49 (1995): 379–414; Kenneth Schultz, “Domestic Opposition and Signaling in International Crises,” American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 829–44; Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011): 437–56.

2 For example, Anne Sartori, Deterrence by Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Dustin Tingley and Barbara Walter, “Can Cheap Talk Deter? An Experimental Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 6 (2011): 996–1020; Roseanne McManus, “Fighting Words: The Effectiveness of Statements of Resolve in International Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 6 (2014): 726–41; Roseanne McManus, Statements of Resolve: Achieving Coercive Credibility in International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Danielle Lupton, “Signaling Resolve: Leaders, Reputations, and the Importance of Early Interactions,” International Interactions 44, no. 1 (2018): 59–87; Danielle Lupton, Reputation for Resolve: How Leaders Establish Reputations in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); Paul MacDonald, “‘Most Potent and Irresistible Moral Influence’: Public Opinion, Rhetorical Coercion, and the Hague Conferences,” Global Policy 11, no. S3 (2020): 104–14.

3 For example, Ronald Krebs and Patrick Jackson, “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric,” European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 35–66; B. Dan Wood, Presidential Saber Rattling: Causes and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jack Holland and Mike Aaronson, “Dominance through Coercion: Strategic Rhetorical Balancing and the Tactics of Justification in Afghanistan and Libya,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 8, no. 1 (2014): 1–20; Ronald Krebs, Narrative and the Making of US National Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015); McManus, Statements; Matthew Gottfried and Robert Trager, “A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises.” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2016): 243–57; Robert Trager, Diplomacy: Communication and the Origins of International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Leah Windsor, Nia Dowell, Alastair Windsor, and John Kaltner, “Leader Language and Political Survival,” International Interactions 44, no. 2 (2018): 321–36. Lupton, Reputation.

4 Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats: Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016).

5 For a discussion of relative military capability and credibility, see: Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Todd Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse: Coercive Threats and Asymmetric Power,” International Organization 64, no. 4 (2010): 627–60. For a discussion of strategic interest and capability see: Press, Calculating; Vesna Danilovic, When Stakes Are High: Deterrence and Conflict Among Major Powers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Joe Clare and Vesna Danilovic, “Reputation for Resolve, Interests, and Conflict,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 29, no. 1 (2012): 3–27. For a discussion of past actions and credibility, see: Alex Weisiger and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation: How Past Actions Matter in International Politics,” International Organization 69, no. 2 (2015):473–95; Frank Harvey and John Mitton, Fighting for Credibility: U.S. Reputation and International Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Lupton, Reputation. For a discussion of domestic constraints and credibility, see: McManus, Statements.

6 For example, Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

7 Robert Trager, “How the Scope of a Demand Conveys Resolve,” International Theory 5, no. 3 (2013): 414–45; Trager, Diplomacy.

8 Matthew Fuhrmann and Todd Sechser. “Signaling Alliance Commitments: Hand-Tying and Sunk Costs in Extended Nuclear Deterrence,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 4 (2014): 919–35; Keren Yarhi-Milo, Joshua Kertzer, and Jonathan Renshon, “Tying Hands, Sinking Costs, and Leader Attributes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 10 (2018): 2150–79.

9 For example, Alexander George and William Simons, eds., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Westview Press, 1994); Press, Calculating; Sechser, “Goliath’s Curse”; Harvey and Mitton, Fighting for Credibility. McManus, Statements, focuses on the extent to which a statement is highly resolved and the external domestic political environment. While McManus primarily explores the ability of leaders to follow through on their statements, this study explores how the construction of statements influences credibility.

10 Robert Trager and Lynn Vavreck, “The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): 526–45; McManus, Statements; Lupton, Reputation.

11 For example, Adam Berinsky, “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 975–97; Elizabeth Saunders, “War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of Using Force,” Security Studies 24, no. 3 (2015): 466–501; Danielle Lupton and Clayton Webb, “Wither Elites? The Role of Elite Credibility and Knowledge in Public Perceptions of Foreign Policy,” International Studies Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2022): sqac057.

12 See Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats; Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

13 Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats, 4.

14 Robert Art and Kelly Greenhill, “Coercion: An Analytical Overview,” in Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics, eds. Kelly Greenhill and Peter Krause (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 6; see, also, Brett Benson, “Unpacking Alliances: Deterrent and Compellent Alliances and Their Relationship with Conflict, 1816–2000,” The Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (2011): 1111–27. For a discussion of the lack of distinction between compellence and deterrence, see: Daniel Byman and David Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

15 Sarah Lynch, “White House Says There Will Be Consequences If Kremlin Critic Navalny Dies,” Reuters (2021), April 18.

16 Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats, 232–33; Wood, Presidential, 47.

17 Wood, Presidential, 41.

18 Alexander Downes and Todd Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility,” International Organization 66, no. 3 (2012): 457–89.

19 Trager and Vavreck, “Political Costs.”

20 See Mercer, Reputation; McManus, Statements.

21 Lupton, Reputation.

22 For example, Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences”; James Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no. 1 (1997): 68–90; Trager, “How the Scope”; Trager, Diplomacy.

23 Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,” International Organization 61, no. 4 (2007): 821–40.

24 Taehee Whang, Elena McClean, and Douglas Kuberski, “Coercion, Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 1 (2013): 65–81; Taehee Whang and Hannah June Kim, “International Signaling and Economic Sanctions,” International Interactions 41, no. 3 (2015): 427–52; David Lekztian and Christopher Sprecher, “Sanctions, Signals, and Militarized Conflict,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2 (2007): 415–31; Susan Hannah Allen and Carla Martinez Machain, “Choosing Air Strikes,” Journal of Global Security Studies 3, no. 2 (2018): 150–62; Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Backing up, Not Backing down: Mitigating Audience Costs through Policy Substitution,” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 1 (2019): 559–74; Abigail Post, “Flying to Fail: Costly Signals and Air Power in Crisis Bargaining,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63, no. 4 (2019): 869–95; Danielle Lupton, “The Reputational Costs and Ethical Implications of Coercive Limited Air Strikes: The Fallacy of the Middle-Ground Approach,” Ethics & International Affairs 34, no. 2 (2020): 217–28.

25 Lupton, “Signaling Resolve.” This suggests there may also be a threshold effect whereby a threat needs to be severe enough to communicate some level of costliness, but there are then diminishing returns from additional levels of severity. In this conceptualization, one could conceive of threat severity not as an objective measure but rather in relation to the severity of the instigating trigger. This study discusses this possibility further later in this paper. One of the benefits of empirical strategy is that it allows for this possibility, and one of the experiments explicitly examines this issue.

26 Sechser and Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons, 45. It is for this reason that this paper does not include the threat to use nuclear weapons as a treatment in the experiment.

27 Kenneth Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

28 Wood, Presidential, 110.

29 Baum, Matthew, “Going Private: Public Opinion, Presidential Rhetoric, and the Domestic Politics of Audience Costs in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 5 (2004): 603–31.

30 Sartori, Deterrence; Shuhei Kurizaki, “Efficient Secrecy: Public versus Private Threats in Crisis Diplomacy,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007): 543–58; Robert Trager, “Long-Term Consequences of Aggressive Diplomacy: European Relations after Austrian Crimean War Threats,” Security Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 232–65; Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Tying Hands Behind Closed Doors: The Logic and Practice of Secret Reassurance,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (2013): 405–35. Austin Carson and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Covert Communication: The Intelligibility and Credibility of Signaling in Secret,” Security Studies 26, no. 1 (2017): 124–56; Azusa Katagiri and Eric Min, “The Credibility of Public and Private Signals: A Document-Based Approach,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 1 (2019): 156–72.

31 Lupton, Reputation.

32 For example, Barry Blachman and Stephen Kaplan, Force Without War (New York: Brookings, 1978), 59.

33 Wood, Presidential, 40.

34 Lupton, Reputation. See, also, Matthew Levendusky and Michael Horowitz, “When Backing Down Is the Right Decision: Partisanship, New Information, and Audience Costs,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (2012): 323–38.

35 For example, Krebs and Jackson, “Twisting”; Krebs, Narrative; Stacie Goddard and Ron Krebs, “Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy,” Security Studies 24 (2015): 5–36; MacDonald, “Most Potent.”

36 Lupton, Reputation.

37 Holland and Aaronson, “Dominance.”

38 Krebs, Narrative; MacDonald, “Most Potent.”

39 Byman and Waxman, Dynamics, 132.

40 Levendusky and Horowitz, “When Backing Down.”

41 Dafoe et al. note that concerns over reputation remain one of the most prominent motives and justifications for war, dating back thousands of years. Allan Dafoe, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth, “Reputation and Status as Motives for War,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014): 371–93.

42 Alexandra Guisinger and Alastair Smith, “Honest Threats: The Interaction of Reputation and Political Institutions in International Crises,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 2 (2002): 177.

43 Lupton, Reputation.

44 See Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, 59; Holland and Aaronson, “Dominance.”

45 Wood, Presidential, 41.

46 Alexander Downes, “Step Aside or Face the Consequences: Explaining the Success and Failure of Compellent Threats to Remove Foreign Leaders,” in Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics, ed. Kelly Greenhill and Peter Krause (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 93–116.

47 Danielle Lupton, Roseanne McManus, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Trump Is Trying to Send a Message to North Korea. He’s Got a Long Way to Go,” The Washington Post (2017), April 26.

48 Phil Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015), 197.

49 Matt McDonald, “‘Lest We Forget’: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention,” International Political Sociology 4, no. 3 (2010): 287–302. See Online SupplementalAppendix for more historical examples of justifications employed by leaders.

50 See Press, Calculating.

51 For example, Jonathan Mercer, “Bad Reputation,” Foreign Affairs (2013), August 28.

52 See Schultz, Democracy; Tomz, “Domestic Audience”; Jack Levy, “Coercive Threats, Audience Costs, and Case Studies,” Security Studies 21 (2012): 383–90.

53 Fearon, “Signaling Foreign.”

54 James Morrow, “Alliances: Why Write Them Down?” Annual Review of Political Science 3, no. 1 (2000): 63–83; Douglas Gibler, “The Costs of Reneging: Reputation and Alliance Formation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (2008): 426–54; Mark Crescenzi, Jacob Kathman, Katja Kleinberg, and Reed Wood, “Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2012): 259–74. The literature suggests that audience costs and reputations may be intertwined to a certain extent, as the invocation of audience costs can bolster (or undermine) an actor’s reputation based on whether she follows through (or backs down) from such audience costs. Conversely, public appeals regarding one’s reputation could be viewed as attempts to create audience costs. One of the benefits of an empirical strategy is that it allows determination of the effect of more general reputational invocations, as well as direct appeals to audience costs, which can help illuminate the underlying mechanisms shaping perceptions of coercive credibility.

55 Erik Knudsen and Mikael Johannesson, “Beyond the Limits of Survey Experiments: How Conjoint Designs Advance Causal Inference in Political Communication Research,” Political Communication 36, no. 2 (2019): 2.

56 Levendusky and Horowitz, “When Backing Down”; Gottfried and Trager, “Preference”; Ryan Brutger and Joshua Kertzer, “A Dispositional Theory of Reputation Costs,” International Organization 72, no. 3 (2018): 693–724; Trager and Vavreck, “Political Costs”; Tomz, “Domestic Audience.”

57 Todd Sechser, “Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918-2001,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, no. 4 (2011): 377–401.

58 For example, Gottfried and Trager, “Preference”; Tomz, “Domestic Audience”; Trager and Vavreck, “Political Costs”; Brutger and Kertzer, “Dispositional Theory”; Levendusky and Horowitz, “When Backing Down”; Joshua Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “How Do Observers Assess Resolve?” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (2021): 308–30.

59 See Lupton, Reputation.

60 Kertzer et al., “How Do Observers.”

61 Kathleen Powers and Dan Altman, “The Psychology of Coercion Failure: How Reactance Explains Resistance to Threats,” American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 1 (2023): 221–38.

62 Michael Colaresi, “When Doves Cry: International Rivalry, Unreciprocated Cooperation, and Leadership Turnover,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 3 (2004): 555–70; Lupton, Reputation.

63 Gottfried and Trager, “Preference.”

64 This includes but is not limited to: Schelling, Arms and Influence; Byman and Waxman, Dynamics; George and Simmons, Limits; Danilovic, When Stakes; McManus, Statements; Lupton, Reputation; Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats; Wood, Presidential.

65 For discussion, see Lupton, Reputation.

66 See Tomz, “Domestic Audience.” These are asked post-treatment to not prime participants prior to the conjoint analysis.

67 Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller, Daniel Hopkins, and Teppei Yamamoto, “The Number of Choice Tasks and Survey Satisficing in Conjoint Experiments,” Political Analysis 26, no. 1 (2018): 112–9.

68 Data available at https://data.census.gov/cedsci/.

69 Data available at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-byparty-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/.

70 Joshua Kertzer, “Re-Assessing Elite-Public Gaps in Political Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science 66, no. 3 (2022): 539–53; Kertzer et al., “How Do Observers”; Danielle Lupton and Clayton Webb, “Experimental Methods,” in Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Methods, ed. Patrick Mello and Falk Ostermann (New York: Routledge, 2023), 338–53; Jonathan Renshon, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Joshua Kertzer, “Democratic Reputations in Crises and War,” The Journal of Politics 85, no. 1 (2023): 1–18. Powers and Altman, “Psychology of Coercion.”

71 Joshua Kertzer and Jonathan Renshon, “Experiments and Surveys on Political Elites,” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (2020): 540.

72 Powers and Altman, “Psychology of Coercion,” 235. See also Kertzer, “Re-Assessing”; Keren Yarhi-Milo, Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

73 Lupton, Reputation. Future work should consider how the arguments apply to countries which may have particularly unique attitudes surrounding issues of reputation, credibility, and honor.

74 Yanna Kurpnikov, H. Hannah Nam, and Hillary Style, “Convenience Samples in Political Science Experiments,” in Advances in Experimental Political Science, ed. James Druckman and Donald Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 165–83.

75 For example, Lupton, Reputation. Powers and Altman, “Psychology of Coercion.” It is also unclear which elites would be most appropriate to survey in this context. Top government officials would certainly be unavailable for such studies, and it is often difficult to ascertain who else would appropriately constitute an “elite.” The current study addresses the limitations of specific treatments that may be driven by the sample choice in the conclusion. One purpose of this study is to encourage future research to directly consider the influence of threat construction among perceptions of alternative audiences.

76 See Jens Hainmueller, Daniel Hopkins, and Teppei Yamamoto, “Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments,” Political Analysis 22, no. 1 (2014): 1–30; Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins, “The Hidden American Immigration Consensus: A Conjoint Analysis of Attitudes Toward Immigrants,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2015): 529–48.

77 Miles Evers, Aleksandr Fisher, and Steven Schaaf, “Is There a Trump Effect? An Experiment on Political Polarization and Audience Costs,” Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 2 (2019): 433–52.

78 Christopher Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, “Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crisis, 1918–94,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): 633–47; Ryan Brutger, “The Power of Compromise: Proposal Power, Partisanship, and Public Support in International Bargaining,” World Politics 73, no. 1 (2020): 128–66.

79 For example, Douglas Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

80 Zeev Maoz, “Resolve, Capabilities, and the Outcome of Interstate Disputes, 1816–1976,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 27, no. 2 (1983): 195–229; Clare and Danilovic, “Reputation”; Lupton, “Reexamining Reputation.”

81 Colaresi, “When Does Cry”; Lupton, Reputation.

82 Maoz, “Resolve, Capabilities”; Gelpi and Griesdorf, “Winners or Losers?”; Clare and Danilovic, “Reputation”; Danielle Lupton, “Reexamining Reputation for Resolve: Leaders, States, and the Onset of International Crises,” Journal of Global Security Studies 3, no. 2 (2018): 198–216.

83 Colaresi, “When Does Cry”; Lupton, Reputation.

84 For example, Fearon, “Signaling Foreign.”

85 For discussion, see Art and Greenhill, “Coercion,” 18.

86 For a discussion of emotion and rhetoric, see Gottfried and Trager, “Preference.” The treatments purposely did not include extreme threats (such as the use of nuclear weapons), but future research should consider how these threats are viewed by both domestic and international audiences.

87 See Lupton, Reputation.

88 Pfundstein Chamberlain, Cheap Threats, 60.

89 Ibid.

90 See Krebs, Narrative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle L. Lupton

Danielle L. Lupton is associate professor of Political Science, Colgate University.