Michal Smetana: "Microfoundations of domestic audience costs in nondemocratic regimes: Experimental evidence from Putin’s Russia"

Michal Smetana from the Department of North American Studies published an article in the interdisciplinary and international peer reviewed bimonthly journal "Journal of Peace Research" of scholarly work in peace research. Congratulations!

Do leaders in nondemocratic regimes face public backlash when they threaten to use military force and back down? Whether citizens disapprove of empty threats is central to studying the domestic ‘audience costs’ in international crisis bargaining, but there is little experimental evidence of this phenomenon from autocracies. In this research article, I present the results of an original survey experiment investigating the microfoundations of domestic audience costs in the Russian Federation. My findings showed that even in Putin’s Russia, the citizens expressed attitudes in line with the audience costs theory. However, I also demonstrate that the effect of audience costs treatments was significantly stronger for the opponents of the current Russian leadership than for the supporters. The results of this study represent an important contribution to the existing literature by providing micro-level empirical evidence from a personalist nondemocratic regime. (abstract)

You can read the article here