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Abstract

To what extent can democratic leaders mitigate the costs of reneging on alliance agreements? Previous research suggests that democratic leaders suffer from domestic backlash if they decide to renege on alliance treaties. However, less is known about whether and to what extent leaders can mitigate the domestic costs of reneging on alliance commitments. We study strategies leaders use to mitigate these costs. Specifically, we experimentally investigate whether and how much the costs of reneging are affected by different sidestepping strategies and the costs of fulfilling an alliance commitment. Results show that the potential costs of fulfilling commitments can dilute the domestic backlash for reneging on alliances, but various sidestepping strategies that work in the standard audience-cost context of reneging on a public threat do not work for reneging on a formal alliance. These findings expand our understanding of the reliability of democratic alliances and show that reneging costs are contingent on the context.

Keywords

Alliances audience costs experiments

Recent research finds that domestic public opinion, in the form of concerns about domestic costs for reneging, influences alliance reliability (Tomz and Weeks, 2021). “Alliance relations between democracies,” writes Fearon (1994: 587), “may be less subject to distrust and suspicion if leaders would pay a domestic cost for reneging on the terms of the alliance.” Concerns about political backlash reduce the likelihood that a leader will back down from a threat or renege on an alliance. Recent experimental research shows that leaders that renege on an alliance agreement would suffer substantial domestic costs (Tomz and Weeks, 2021: 816).

Experimental research has also found that leaders can employ a variety of strategies to mitigate the costs associated with backing down from a threat. Leaders can reduce domestic political costs by “sidestepping” commitments through rhetoric, third-party mediators, or economic sanctions in lieu of military force (Davies and Johns, 2013; Levendusky and Horowitz, 2012; Lin-Greenberg, 2019; Quek and Johnston, 2018). Other experimental research on threats finds that the public imposes a belligerence cost on leaders for making a threat (Kertzer and Brutger, 2016), suggesting that the cost of conflict is a salient concern for many. Since “alliances operate in the shadow of war” (Morrow, 2000: 63), expectations about the cost of conflict may be especially relevant for understanding public views on honoring an alliance.

The contribution of this research is twofold. First, we lay out strategies that might affect the domestic costs of reneging on an alliance commitment. Prior research has established that audience costs exist in the alliance context (Tomz and Weeks, 2021), but little is known about how contextual factors might influence the public’s assessment of leaders who renege on an alliance agreement. Second, we provide a causal assessment of the strategies to reduce the domestic costs of reneging on an alliance. Our experimental approach helps to overcome the selection biases that observational studies face, providing an internally valid assessment.

Specifically, we examine whether and how much the costs of reneging on an alliance are affected by the cost of fulfilling an alliance commitment as well as by different sidestepping strategies. Results from our experiment show that the potential costs of fulfilling commitments can dilute the domestic backlash for reneging on alliances, but various sidestepping strategies that work in the standard audience-cost context of reneging on a verbal threat do not work for reneging on a formal alliance. Our findings suggest that democratic alliance reliability is not unqualified.

Public opinion, domestic costs, and the reliability of democratic allies

The earliest expositions of audience cost theory connect domestic costs to alliance reliability (Fearon, 1994: 587; Fearon, 1997: 85). Because democratic leaders depend on domestic support to retain office, they are mindful of public opinion and the potential costs from breaking a commitment. Indeed, recent studies find that public opinion can significantly influence the foreign policy preferences of democratic leaders (Chu and Recchia, 2022; Tomz et al., 2020). Anchoring the reliability of democratic allies, therefore, are the domestic costs of reneging on an alliance that democratic leaders seek to avoid.

How leaders frame a choice also affects public opinion. A leader is unlikely to say she is abandoning an ally. Instead, leaders are likely to frame any “backdown” choice as a more prudent course of action either through a sidestepping strategy or highlighting the costs of involvement. For example, President Biden (2021) withdrew from Afghanistan, a U.S. ally engaged in a fight for its survival, while emphasizing that US support for their Afghan partners can be enhanced “not through endless military deployments, but through diplomacy, economic tools and rallying the rest of the world for support.”¹ Beckley (2015) contends that great powers are prone to use sidestepping strategies to avoid unwanted alliance commitments—for example, “the United States blatantly retracting a pledge to Taiwan to defend Jinmen and Mazu in 1955 [and] refusing to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954” by different sidestepping strategies (Beckley, 2015: 47). These examples echo a strand of experimental research showing that leaders can placate the public with sidestepping strategies such as rhetoric and economic sanctions (Davies and Johns, 2013; Levendusky and Horowitz, 2012; Lin-Greenberg, 2019; Quek and Johnston, 2018).

To avoid fulfilling an alliance commitment, leaders are also likely to highlight the cost of involvement. Research on public opinion and military intervention indicates that leaders lose political support as casualties increase (Eichenberg, 2005; Gelpi et al., 2009; Mueller, 1973). Similarly, support for military interventions decreases when expectations of success decrease (Eichenberg, 2005). In brief, the public prefers to avoid significant casualties and desires mission success.

Prior experimental research on alliances has focused on three issues: (1) how an alliance agreement affects public support for war (Tomz and Weeks 2021); (2) how different types of alliance agreements (general alliances vs defensive alliances) and beliefs about who initiated conflict affect public support for war (Fjelstul et al. 2015); and (3) how alliance partners’ characteristics (such as their level of democracy) affect public support for alliance termination in peacetime (Levin and Kobayashi 2022). Prior work has established the existence of audience costs in the context of alliances (Tomz and Weeks, 2021).² We build on this work to investigate whether and to what extent leaders can mitigate the domestic backlash that arises from reneging on alliance agreements when war has begun.

Experimental design and implementation

We conducted a survey experiment with 1459 Americans on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in August 2019. AMT provides non-probability samples that are useful for experimental purposes.³ Indeed, because probability samples are difficult to obtain for many researchers, most audience-cost experiments have used non-probability samples (e.g., Davies and Johns 2013; Levendusky and Horowitz 2012; Lin-Greenberg 2019; Quek and Johnston 2018), including AMT (e.g., Brutger 2021; Croco et al. 2021; Levy et al. 2015; Nomikos and Sambanis 2019). As a robustness check, we also reran our analyses with our survey data reweighed based on US population parameters (see Tables A6–A9 in Appendix). Our conclusions remain unchanged.

Our experimental vignette draws from Fjelstul et al. (2015), which studied how the type of alliance and beliefs about who initiated conflict shape public support for military intervention. This experimental vignette has two important features. First, it mimics the audience-cost experimental setup in which the president threatens to use military force abroad but backs down in the end. Second, unlike the traditional audience-cost setup, it presents an alliance scenario where a US ally and a third country are at war.

Our experiment randomly assigned the respondents to one of five treatment conditions or the baseline condition under a between-subjects design. In the baseline condition, respondents read a scenario where Countries A and B are at war. Country A had an alliance treaty with the US, in which “[i]f one member of the alliance is involved in a war that it did not start, the other member will use military force to help its ally.”⁴ Respondents were told that Country A requested military assistance from the US, but the US president decided not to get involved. The five treatment conditions described the same scenario, except that an additional sentence was injected to encapsulate a particular sidestepping strategy or circumstance that might mitigate the costs of reneging on the alliance treaty.⁵ Due to space constraints, we summarize these treatments and their hypotheses below and discuss in detail in the Appendix the theoretical and empirical motivations behind each treatment.

Costs of reneging conditional on costs of fulfilling

In the first treatment, the Joint Chief of Staff estimated that if the US joined the war, there would be a large number of US casualties. In the second treatment, the potential costs of fulfilling the commitment were framed in terms of low prospects of victory, with the Joint Chief of Staff estimating that the US ally was unlikely to win even if the US joined the war. Both treatments connect to the public opinion literature on military intervention (Mueller, 1973; Eichenberg, 2005; Gelpi et al., 2009), and we expect both treatments to increase public approval for reneging on the alliance (H1 and H2).

Costs of reneging conditional on sidestepping strategies

We focus on three different sidestepping strategies drawn from the audience-cost literature. These are realistic strategies that leaders have used in the past; they have also yielded substantively strong effects in previous experiments using salient real-world crisis scenarios (Quek and Johnston 2018). Our third treatment captures a rhetoric-based sidestepping strategy, with the president justifying his decision by explaining that military intervention would hurt the economy. President Trump used a similar economic rationale for breaking US commitments, including renegotiating (e.g., NAFTA), avoiding (e.g., TPP), threatening to break (e.g., NATO and US-South Korean alliance) and backing away from international commitments (e.g., Paris Climate Agreement). We hypothesize and test if the economic justification rhetoric will increase public approval for reneging on the alliance commitment (H3). Our fourth treatment captures a sidestepping strategy involving third-party mediation, where we expect public approval for reneging on the alliance will increase when respondents are informed that the UN Secretary-General has called for peace and offered UN mediation (H4). Our fifth treatment captures an action-based sidestepping strategy, with the president imposing economic sanctions in lieu of military intervention. This strategy is often used in the real world and experiments have also shown that it is effective in reducing the domestic costs for backing down from a verbal threat (Lin-Greenberg 2019; Quek and Johnston 2018). Analogously, but in the context of a formal alliance treaty, we hypothesize the treatment will cause an increase in approval for reneging on the alliance (H5).

Our main dependent variable is public approval for the president’s decision to renege on the alliance commitment. This measurement is widely used in audience cost experiments to assess situational approval (e.g., the public’s assessment of a leader’s handling of a particular international crisis) (e.g., Levendusky and Horowitz, 2012; Tomz, 2007). We focus on percentage approval,⁶ which is more intuitive, but similar inferences are obtained with the seven-point approval score. (Indeed, results that are significant based on approval percentage have even smaller p-values when based on the seven-point approval score.) The full wordings of the questions and experimental vignettes are shown in the Appendix.

Results

Consistent with prior research, we find that a majority of the respondents disapprove of reneging on the alliance commitment, with only 38% approving of the choice to back down in the baseline condition.

Figure 1 shows the difference in approval between the control and each treatment condition. When respondents read about the potential for significant American casualties (Treatment 1), approval for reneging on the alliance increases by 11 points, resulting in a shift from majority disapproval to an even split of 49% in favor and 51% against (p = .013, N = 472).⁷ Likewise, when respondents read about operational inefficacy (Treatment 2), approval for reneging increases by eight percentage points to 46% (p = .07, N = 486). These results show that citizens are indeed sensitive to the potential costs of conflict (Eichenberg 2005; Gelpi et al. 2009), and that the pros of fulfilling an alliance commitment are weighed against its cons in the mind of the public. In the abstract, the public prefers to honor an alliance, but casualty expectations or low prospects for success can shift the public’s view of reneging on an alliance commitment.

Figure 1.

Plot of Treatment Effects (95% confidence interval). Note: Plotted values on the y-axis represent the difference in the approval rate between the control group and each treatment group.

Past studies suggest that various sidestepping strategies can mitigate the cost of backing down from a public threat. Do they also affect the cost of breaking an alliance commitment? Figure 1 shows that when the president justifies the decision to renege by highlighting negative economic consequences (Treatment 3), public approval does not increase (p = .45, N = 493). This result implies that respondents may not necessarily view economic costs—such as the one used repeatedly by the Trump administration to break prior US commitments—as a valid justification for reneging on an alliance. Instead, they may doubt or question a President's claim that fulfilling obligations would result in such costs, perceiving it as a self-serving justification.

Do UN mediation and the imposition of economic sanctions increase public support for reneging on alliances? Compared to the baseline condition, both the UN mediation (Treatment 4) and the economic sanctions (Treatment 5) conditions exhibited a statistically insignificant 6% increase in approval for reneging on alliance commitments (p = .20, N = 497 in the UN mediation condition; p = .18, N = 491 in the economic sanctions condition).⁸ These realistic sidestepping strategies, which had strong effects in the context of backing down from verbal threats (Lin-Greenberg 2019; Quek and Johnston 2018), proved less effective in the context of reneging on formal alliances.

Reputational concerns

In varying levels of specificity, different studies have converged on the idea—anchored theoretically by Fearon (1994) and empirically by Tomz (2007)—that citizens punish their leaders for damaging their country’s reputation. Recent work by Tomz and Weeks (2021) further suggests that concerns over reputational damage are important in motivating the public to endorse military interventions to defend US allies.

To evaluate if respondents believe that reneging on an alliance commitment damages the country’s reputation, we asked if they agreed or disagreed that other countries would question America’s willingness to honor other military alliance agreements or non-military agreements (see Appendix). These questions allow us to know what effect the five treatment strategies might have on the public’s perception of their country’s reputation.

We find that reputational concerns were considerable across the board, hovering around 3.9 to 4.1 on a five-point scale from 1 (“disagree strongly”) to 5 (“agree strongly”) for future military alliance agreements, and around 3.7 to 3.9 for non-military agreements. None of the treatment strategies allayed those concerns, except for the UN mediation treatment in the context of future military agreements. Compared to the baseline condition where participants assessed the reputational damage at 4.1, those exposed to the UN mediation treatment lowered their assessment of reputational damage to 3.9 (p = .016, N = 497).⁹ For non-military agreements, participants assessed the reputational damage at 3.8 in the baseline condition compared to 3.7 to 3.9 in the treatment conditions.¹⁰ Even though respondents are more supportive of breaking an alliance to avoid casualties or operational failure, they still have concerns about reputational damage.

Finally, we ran regressions on the outcome variables of approval score and reputational assessment, controlling for different combinations of the respondents’ demographic characteristics. Our conclusions remain robust across different specifications (Appendix Tables A1–A4).

Conclusion

We examine factors affecting the domestic costs for reneging on alliance commitments and in the process contribute to research on the reliability of democratic allies and the efficacy of sidestepping strategies. Arguments for the reliability of democratic allies frequently emphasize the domestic political costs for reneging on alliance commitments. However, honoring an alliance does not occur in a vacuum, and casualties and expectations of success are relevant considerations. Further, leaders could use and have used different strategies to sidestep their commitments. Yet it is unknown whether political sidestepping strategies and the costs of fulfilling alliance commitments might sway public views of reneging on an alliance and, by implication, the reliability of alliances.

We find that the domestic costs of reneging on an alliance can depend significantly on the potential costs of fulfilling the commitment which the public also cares about. Particularly when the costs are denoted in terms of American casualties, approval for reneging increased, shifting the balance of opinion from majority disapproval to a half-half split (49%). Our research is consistent with qualitative work arguing that US presidents have been able to avoid significant domestic backlash, even when the US openly took a stance against an ally. For instance, in 1955, when the US explicitly withdrew its commitment to defend Jinmen and Mazu in Taiwan or when it declined to aid the French during the Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 (Beckley, 2015).

Further, our experiment shows that three important sidestepping strategies, which had demonstrated strong effects in the context of backing down from verbal threats (Lin-Greenberg 2019; Quek and Johnston 2018), were less effective in the context of reneging on formal alliances. These findings indicate that institutionalized alliance commitments are not as easy to sidestep as a verbal threat.

One limitation of this research is that we examine situational approval and not overall approval of the national leader. Although this is the norm in audience-cost research, situational approval ratings can fluctuate, and domestic backlash may be temporary. Taking into account the influence of elites' aspirations for winning reelection (Croco et al., 2021; Fearon, 1994), as well as the fact that national leaders often prioritize general approval, it is important to examine the long-term consequences of breaching alliance agreements. Such exploration will enhance our understanding of how foreign policy decisions affect the overall support that national leaders receive from the public.

In conclusion, leaders in the real world can frame their decisions to avoid a domestic backlash, but existing research on alliance reliability does not take this into account. We find that when leaders highlight casualties or a low chance of victory, the public backlash from breaking an alliance commitment reduces. Democratic alliance reliability is not unqualified.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Reneging on alliances: Experimental evidence

Supplemental Material for Reneging on alliances: Experimental evidence by Weifang Xu, Kai Quek, and Mark Souva in Research & Politics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We thank the University of Hong Kong for funding.

ORCID iD

Mark Souva

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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