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 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.

观众成本（audience costs）是诸多主流国际冲突理论的核心特征。本研究通过明确界定产生观众成本所需的国内制度条件，深化了学界对观众成本的认知。在本研究的概念框架中，观众成本能力（audience cost capacity, ACC）由替代性执政者的可获取性，以及动员反对现任执政者的成本共同决定。这一概念框架催生了首个可刻画不同民主程度政治体系间，以及威权政体内部差异的观众成本能力测度指标。我们对该测度指标开展了一系列严格检验，其中涵盖了针对选择效应与时间处理效应的分析——这两类效应在本研究领域中尚未得到充分探讨。实证分析结果为该测度指标的有效性提供了强有力的支撑。