Leaders who make public international commitments and then back down suffer domestic penalties, which is what makes their threats credible.
Fearon's 1994 argument gives democracies an advantage in crisis bargaining: because a public commitment is costly to abandon, making one signals resolve in a way a private threat cannot. The empirical difficulty is finding the punishment. Critics point to leaders who retreated publicly and were re-elected.
In practice
- A chief executive who announces a red line in public has made retreating expensive, which is the point.
- A negotiator who commits privately has kept an option the public commitment would have removed.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is reputation: a leader who backs down publicly can be punished by voters for incompetence or weakness, and the prospect of that punishment is what makes the threat credible to the other side.
- In its favour
- The logic is clear and it gave a precise account of why democracies might bargain differently, which generated a large research programme.
- Against it
- Historical cases in which leaders backed down without evident punishment are numerous, survey experiments supporting it have been challenged on design, and the effect may depend on how the opponent reads domestic politics abroad.
- Standing
- Contested. Historical cases in which leaders backed down without evident punishment are numerous, and experimental support has been challenged on whether survey respondents behave like real electorates.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works