Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy

We challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic leaders are more accountable than autocratic leaders. We argue that a winning coalition's abilities to monitor and sanction a leader increase as its size decreases. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that autocratic leaders are more accountable than democratic leaders due to the monitoring and sanctioning advantages of smaller coalitions relative to larger coalitions. Many international relations scholars hold that the conventional wisdom explains important variation in leaders’ behavior during crisis bargaining and in the outcomes of international disputes. We evaluate our theory and the conventional perspective by examining rival predictions regarding leaders’ ability to avoid incurring audience costs by conducting crisis negotiations and making concessions outside their coalitions’ view. A reassessment of us-ussr diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a favored case of the conventional wisdom, indicates the plausibility of our theory in the context of security crises.