Replication data for: The Illusion of Democratic Credibility

Do democracies make more effective coercive threats? An influential literature in international relations argues that democratic institutions allow leaders to credibly signal their resolve in crises, thereby making their threats more likely to work than threats by nondemocracies. This article revisits the quantitative evidence for this proposition, which we call the \"democratic credibility hypothesis,\" and finds that it is surprisingly weak. Close examination of the datasets most commonly used to test this hypothesis reveals that they contain few successful democratic threats, or indeed threats of any kind. Moreover, these datasets' outcome variables do not properly measure the effectiveness of threats, and therefore yield misleading results. The article then reassesses the democratic credibility hypothesis using the Militarized Compellent Threats dataset, a new dataset designed specifically to test hypotheses about the effectiveness of coercive threats. The analysis indicates that threats from democracies are no more successful than threats from other states.

民主国家能否发起更有效的胁迫性威胁？国际关系领域一支颇具影响力的学术研究流派认为，民主制度能够让领导人在危机中可信地传递自身决心，进而使其威胁比非民主国家的威胁更易达成目标。本文重新检视了支撑这一被我们称为"民主可信度假说（democratic credibility hypothesis）"的命题的量化证据，却发现该证据的说服力出奇薄弱。对最常用于检验该假说的数据集进行细致检视后可见，这些数据集内成功的民主国家胁迫威胁样本极少，甚至几乎不存在任何类型的威胁样本。此外，这些数据集的结果变量未能恰当衡量威胁的有效性，因此得出了具有误导性的研究结果。随后，本文采用专门为检验胁迫威胁有效性相关假说而构建的全新数据集——军事化胁迫威胁数据集（Militarized Compellent Threats dataset），重新评估了民主可信度假说。分析结果表明，民主国家发起的威胁并不比其他国家的威胁更易成功。