Intellectual Merit: Every day leaders make threats and promises to other countries. Without a world government that compels leaders to keep commitments, why and when should anyone take foreign leaders at their word? In this CAREER research the investigator presents an integrated program of research and education to explore this fundamental question. The research and teaching focuses on two potentially important markers of credibility. Did leaders go public by telling their own citizens about threats and promises they issued abroad? And did they go legal by embedding their commitments in treaties and other international agreements? Although the theoretical literature about public and legal commitments has advanced quickly, empirical research has not kept pace. The fundamental problem, which researchers have acknowledged but not satisfactorily overcome, is endogeneity. In precisely the situations when publicity and legalization would make it costly to renege, rational leaders will either follow through or avoid committing in the first place. This leaves scholars little chance to observe and measure the penalties that are central to our theoretical models. Research has also been hampered by insufficient data about perceptions. Do key actors believe public and legal commitments are more expensive to break? To know for sure, we need systematic data about the perceived costs of backtracking on public and legal commitments. The Principal Investigator addresses these problems through the first-ever experimental analysis of public and legal commitments in international relations. The proposal has three interrelated components. First, I will refine and test leading theories by embedding experiments in surveys of masses and elites. The experiments are designed to measure the actual and perceived costs of reneging on public and legal commitments, while at the same time avoiding the endogeneity that is endemic to observational studies. Overall, the project supplies empirical microfoundations for a broad class of models and open new avenues for theoretical and empirical research. Second, the investigator develops a computer software package to facilitate survey experiments in research and teaching. Scholars need only supply the questions, set a few parameters that control the experiments, and include sound or video clips as desired. The software automatically varies the content, order, and number of questions to match the researcher's design, and then compile a multimedia survey for delivery over the Internet. This tool reduces the financial and human costs of running experiments. Moreover, its audio and visual features should improve respondent satisfaction and elicit more thoughtful responses than standard Internet surveys. Finally, the project contains a strong educational component including a research-based curriculum for undergraduates at Stanford. As part of their coursework, students will formulate hypotheses about international military and economic affairs, test them with the survey software tool, and present their findings in oral and written form. Outside the classroom, the investigator conducts an international relations laboratory where undergraduates collaborate with me and each other on the research in this proposal. With the data we collect, students have opportunities to make their own discoveries and publish them as honors theses or academic articles. Each summer, the investigator invites motivated high school students especially members of underrepresented minority groups to intern in the lab and learn about political science. Finally, the project serves graduate students through a new course about experimental methods in international relations. Broader Impacts: The project (1) actively involves undergraduate and high school students in scholarly research, (2) develops a survey tool that could be used by teachers and researchers in many academic disciplines and in the private sector, (3) provides practical criteria for judging whether foreign leaders are likely to carry out their threats and promises, and (4) offers insights to leaders who must decide whether to commit publicly and legally in world affairs.
Leaders often make threats and promises when dealing with other countries. Without a world government to enforce commitments, though, when and why should anyone take foreign leaders at their word? This project examined two potentially important sources of credibility: publicity and legalization. Through a combination of experiments and historical analysis, the principal investigator (PI) clarified the consequences of publicizing international commitments and embedding them in international law. The PI found that leaders can enhance the credibility of international threats by communicating them publicly. Experiments revealed that presidents and prime ministers would suffer significant domestic disapproval—or "domestic audience costs"—if they issued international threats and failed to follow through. In the experiments, leaders who threatened before backing down were less popular than leaders who made no effort at all. Many people disapproved when their leader backed down, because they thought it would undermine the reputation of the leader or the country. Additional research showed that politicians expect constituents to penalize them for making public threats and subsequently changing course. In summary, publicity contributes to credibility by raising the risk of domestic audience costs, thereby giving leaders an extra incentive to follow through. This project also investigated the effects legalization in international relations. Some people contend that treaties and other legal agreements carry special weight in world affairs; others view such agreements as "scraps of paper" that countries can violate with impunity. The PI found, through experiments, that legalization changes peoples’ preferences and beliefs. Citizens and policymakers are far more likely to oppose policies that would violate international law than to oppose otherwise identical policies that would not trammel upon the law. Moreover, many people anticipate that signatories to treaties will behave differently from nonsignatories. These effects arise, in part, via a reputational mechanism. By embedding commitments in a legal framework, treaties raise the reputational cost of reneging. In addition to running experiments, the PI collected and analyzed historical data. For instance, the PI worked with a team of research assistants to create a new dataset about military threats in international relations. The dataset, which spans half a century, provides detailed information about more than one thousand crises in which countries publicly threatened to use military force against other countries. The database will provide new insights about the causes of war, the consequences of public threats, and the escalation of international disputes. Similarly, the PI analyzed historical data about legal commitments in trade and finance. For example, many countries are members of legal agreements that regulate international trade. The PI analyzed patterns of global commerce since the 1940s, and found that trade was substantially higher among countries that had signed trade agreements, than among countries that had not. Separately, the PI investigated why most countries honor their debt contracts with private foreign creditors, even when those debt contracts are not legally enforceable. The research, which covered three centuries of financial history, explained how reputations form and help sustain international lending and repayment. At the same time, the research uncovered surprisingly little evidence of punitive enforcement strategies. Across the centuries, creditors generally have not forced foreign borrowers to repay by sending gunboats, imposing trade sanctions, or colluding to deprive defaulters of future loans. Overall, this project showed how publicity and legalization affect the credibility of international commitments. The findings could inform future decisions about whether to publicize and legalize U.S. commitments, and could help the U.S. assess the credibility of threats and promises by other nations. Finally, this project contained a significant educational component, by actively involving more than 250 students in scientific research. The students, who ranged from high school to graduate school, learned to design and execute rigorous studies. They received extensive training in project design, data collection, quantitative analysis, and oral and written presentations. Thus, the project not only lead to new discoveries about the credibility of international commitments, but also helped educate a new generation of researchers.
