Blame Dynamics and Audience Cost Theory.

The power of audience costs to tie a leader's hands relies on a reliable punishment mechanism. Punishment by an audience, in turn, requires two related but distinct judgments by the audience: 1) a policy preference against breaking a commitment; 2) an appraisal that the leader is blameworthy for the broken commitment. We know a good deal about the first but little about the second. Both formal models (e.g. Fearon 1994) and empirical tests (e.g. Tomz 2007) assume away or confound this second stage, yet modern democratic politics offers many cases where policy reversals and failures have not damaged a national leader. This paper presents findings from a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample that specifically investigates blame dynamics in public commitment scenarios associated with audience cost theory. Domestic blame targets appear to be largely ineffective while embedding a public commitment in a multilateral context permits leaders to re-direct blame when backing down and suffer almost no audience costs. The paper then uses psychological and legal theories of blame appraisal to explain this difference and develops a surprising implication: rather than boosting the credibility of military threats and uses of force, multilateralism may multiply potential blame targets and loosen rather than tighten the hands of leaders issuing public promises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]