Expectation Costs in International Disputes: How Words Work Like Tanks for Accountable Leaders

Recent theorizing has emphasized that military mobilizations both sink costs and tie hands, unlike signaling strategies that rely solely on punishments for bluffing, like audience costs. I argue that public reactions to bluffs, and inconsistency more generally, have been misunderstood in this regard, and that a reconceptualization of audience costs as prospect-theory-driven "expectation costs" suggests that threats from leaders who are more accountable to some opinionated audience function as costly signals very much like military mobilizations. This dynamic can help explain, without contradiction, four major phenomena: why all but the most unaccountable leaders consistently act as if bluffing is costly even though traditional audience costs may be trivial; why more accountable leaders' threats are more successful regardless of how and to whom the leader is accountable; why democracies rarely engage in militarized disputes, much less war, with each other; and why the overall relationship between war and democracy is parabolic.