7 - Credibility undermined: the implications of domestic dissent

Summary

“The representatives of a democracy cannot run contrary to the basic wishes of the people in any game of bluff.”

John F. Kennedy

Chapter 6 showed how public signals of domestic support can increase the credibility, and hence the effectiveness, of threats made by democratic governments. In this chapter, we consider the other side of the coin: how actual or anticipated dissent can constrain democratic governments from making threats in a crisis and undermine the credibility of the threats they choose to make. In particular, this chapter presents evidence to support two final hypotheses:

Hypothesis 9: Expected dissent from the opposition party reduces the likelihood that the government will bluff.

Hypothesis 10: When a democratic government makes a threat, foreign decision makers will interpret domestic opposition as an indication that the government has political incentives to avoid using force.

Together, these hypotheses articulate the causal mechanism underlying the restraining effect and the statistical evidence presented in Chapter 5. There, we saw that governments in competitive polities are less likely to initiate crises. Here, we show that the anticipation of domestic opposition can generate precisely such an effect: by encouraging foreign states to resist opposed threats and thereby inducing restraint on democratic governments.

For reasons that were partly evident in Chapter 6, these hypotheses are best examined through detailed case studies rather than statistical tests. The very nature of the hypothesized effect suggests that cases in which the government makes opposed threats may be quite rare. As we saw in Chapter 6, the small number of such observations can hamper statistical analysis.