Michael Tomz

Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach

What makes international threats credible? Recent theories point to domestic audience costs—the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down+ This article provides the first direct evidence of audi- ence costs+ The analysis, based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys, shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation+ The costs are evident throughout the population, and espe- cially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy+ Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader+ These findings help identify how, and under what conditions, domestic audiences make commitments credible+ At the same time, they demonstrate the promise of using ex- periments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations+

Institutions in International Relations: Understanding the Effects of the GATT and the WTO on World Trade

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been touted as premier examples of international institutions, but few studies have offered empirical proof. This article comprehensively evaluates the effects of the GATT/WTO and other trade agreements since World War II. Our analysis is organized around two factors: institutional standing and institutional embeddedness. We show that many countries had rights and obligations, or institutional standing, in the GATT/WTO even though they were not formal members of the agreement. We also expand the analysis to include a range of other commercial agreements that were embedded with the GATT/WTO. Using data on dyadic trade since 1946, we demonstrate that the GATT/WTO substantially increased trade for countries with institutional standing, and that other embedded agreements had similarly positive effects. Moreover, our evidence suggests that international trade agreements have complemented, rather than undercut, each other.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28–31, 2003. We thank Tim BA¼the, Joanne Gowa, Miles Kahler, Andrew Rose, Arthur Stein, Richard Steinberg, and seminar participants at Stanford University, the University of Chicago (PIPES), the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Virginia, for many helpful comments. We especially thank Claire Adida, Ashley Conner, Moonhawk Kim, Erin Krampetz, James Morrison, Mike Nardis, Natan Sachs, Rachel Rubinfeld, and Jessica Weeks for excellent research assistance. We are grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant SES-0548285 to Tomz), the Stanford Center for International Development, and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford.

The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity

Candidates often make ambiguous statements about the policies they intend to pursue. In theory, ambiguity affects how voters make choices and who wins elections. In practice, measurement and endogeneity problems have impeded empirical research about the consequences of ambiguity. We conducted survey experiments that overcame these obstacles by manipulating a common form of ambiguity: the imprecision of candidate positions. Our data show that, on average, ambiguity does not repel and may, in fact, attract voters. In nonpartisan settings, voters who have neutral or positive attitudes toward risk, or who feel uncertain about their own policy preferences, tend to embrace ambiguity. In partisan settings, voters respond even more positively to ambiguity; they optimistically perceive the locations of ambiguous candidates from their own party without pessimistically perceiving the locations of vague candidates from the opposition. We further find, through analysis of two additional new data sets, that candidates often take—and voters frequently perceive—ambiguous positions like the ones in our experiments. The pervasive use of ambiguity in campaigns fits with our experimental finding that ambiguity can be a winning strategy, especially in partisan elections.

How Does Voting Equipment Affect the Racial Gap in Voided Ballots

An accumulating body of research suggests that African Americans cast invalid ballots at a higher rate than whites. Our analysis of a unique precinct-level dataset from South Carolina and Louisiana shows that the black-white gap in voided ballots depends crucially on the voting equipment people use. In areas with punch cards or optically scanned ballots, the black-white gap ranged from four to six percentage points. Lever and electronic machines, which prohibit overvoting and make undervoting more transparent and correctible, cut the discrepancy by a factor of ten. Judging from exit polls and opinion surveys, much of the remaining difference could be due to intentional undervoting, which African Americans profess to practice at a slightly higher rate than whites. In any case, the use of appropriate voting technologies can virtually eliminate the black-white disparity in invalid ballots.

Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

One of the most striking findings in political science is the democratic peace: the absence of war between democracies. Some authors attempt to explain this phenomenon by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and argue that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This logic predicts that democracies should behave peacefully in general, but history shows that democracies avoid war primarily in their relations with other democracies. In this article we investigate not whether democratic publics are averse to war in general, but whether they are especially reluctant to fight other democracies. We embedded experiments in public opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom and found that individuals are substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, our experiments suggest that shared democracy pacifies the public primarily by changing perceptions of threat and morality, not by raising expectations of costs or failure. These findings shed light on a debate of enduring importance to scholars and policy makers.

Conditional Cooperation and Climate Change

It is widely believed that international cooperation can arise through strategies of reciprocity. In this paper, we investigate whether citizens in the United States and 25 other countries support reciprocity to deal with climate change. We find little public enthusiasm for intrinsic reciprocity, in which countries restrain their consumption of fossil fuels if and only if other countries do the same. In contrast, we find significant support for extrinsic reciprocity, in which countries enforce cooperation by linking issues. Citizens support economic sanctions against polluters and are willing to shame them in international forums, especially when the polluters are violating a treaty. Cooperation could, therefore, emerge from efforts to link climate with other issues and to embed climate commitments in international law.

Sovereign Theft: Theory and Evidence about Sovereign Default and Expropriation

This paper examines the relationship between default on sovereign borrow- ing and the expropriation of foreign direct investment in both theory and in practice

Electoral Surprise and the Midterm Loss in US Congressional Elections

Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal argue that surprise about the outcomes of US presidential elections accounts for two important features of the American political economy: the regular loss of votes experienced by the presidents party in midterm congressional elections, and the systematic relationship between the party of the incoming president and macroeconomic performance. Scholars recently have begun conducting rigorous tests of the relationship between surprise and economic performance, but no similar empirical work exists on how surprise affects midterm elections. In this article, we offer the first direct test of the proposition that electoral surprise drives the midterm loss. Our analysis shows that the more surprised moderate voters are about the outcome of a presidential election, the lower the probability that they will support the presidents party in the following midterm contest.

Modern Political Economy and Latin America: Theory and Policy

6. “The Method of Analysis: Modern Political Economy” (Jeffry Frieden, 1991) 7. “Political Models of Macroeconomic Policy and Fiscal Reforms” (Alberto Alesina, 1994) 8. “Understanding Economic Policy Reform” (Dani Rodrik, 1996) 9. “What Do We Know about the Political Economy of Economic Policy Reform?” (Stephan Haggard and Steven B. Webb, 1993) 10. “Uses and Limitations of Rational Choice” (Barbara Geddes, 1995)

Why Don't Trade Preferences Reflect Economic Self-Interest?

The dominant approach to the study of international political economy assumes that the policy preferences of individuals and groups reflect economic self-interest. Recent research has called this assumption into question by suggesting that voters do not have economically self-interested preferences about trade policy. We investigate one potential explanation for this puzzling finding: economic ignorance. We show that most voters do not understand the economic consequences of protectionism. We then use experiments to study how voters would respond if they had more information about how trade barriers affect the distribution of income. We find that distributional cues generate two opposing effects: they make people more likely to express self-serving policy preferences, but they also make people more sensitive to the interests of others. In our study both reactions were evident, but selfish responses outweighed altruistic ones. Thus, if people knew more about the distributional effects of trade, the correlation between personal interests and policy preferences would tighten. By showing how the explanatory power of economic self-interest depends on beliefs about causality, this research provides a foundation for more realistic, behaviorally informed theories of international political economy.