Tying Hands, Sinking Costs, and Leader Attributes

2018/10/21 by Keren Yarhi-Milo, Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon · 8 citations
Social Sciences · #Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts #International Relations and Foreign Policy #Peacebuilding and International Security

paper · doi:10.1177/0022002718785693

Abstract

Do costly signals work? Despite their widespread popularity, both hands-tying and sunk-cost signaling have come under criticism, and there’s little direct evidence that leaders understand costly signals the way our models tell us they should. We present evidence from a survey experiment fielded on a unique sample of elite decision makers from the Israeli Knesset. We find that both types of costly signaling are effective in shaping assessments of resolve for both leaders and the public. However, although theories of signaling tend to assume homogenous audiences, we show that leaders vary significantly in how credible they perceive signals to be, depending on their foreign policy dispositions, rather than their levels of military or political experience. Our results thus encourage international relations scholars to more fully bring heterogeneous recipients into our theories of signaling and point to the important role of dispositional orientations for the study of leaders.

Citations

• When Backing Down Is the Right Decision: Partisanship, New Information, and Audience Costs
• The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound
• Rationalist explanations for war
• Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes
• Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve
• Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach
• Signaling Foreign Policy Interests
• Promises or Policies? An Experimental Analysis of International Agreements and Audience Reactions
• The Illusion of Democratic Credibility

Cited by

• Interstate Conciliation in the Shadow of Deep Historical Grievances
• Diplomacy by committee: Assessing resolve and costly signals in group settings
• Dovish Hawks: How Leaders’ Combat Experience Influences the End of Civil Conflicts in Peace Agreements
• Delegating Destruction: Coercive Threats and Automated Nuclear Systems
• Winning Hearts and Minds? How the United States Reassured During the Russo-Ukrainian War
• Reassuring allies in times of crisis: assessing the effectiveness of tools for alliance reassurance in crises
• The impact of situational context and dispositions on costly signals of reassurance: Experimental evidence from Taiwan
• Experiments and Surveys on Political Elites

Related

• Signaling Foreign Policy Interests
• Diplomacy by committee: Assessing resolve and costly signals in group settings
• Making It Personal: The Role of Leader-Specific Signals in Extended Deterrence
• Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve
• Signaling Theory: State of the Theory and Its Future