Description
Domestic political conditions shape foreign policy decisions in democratic systems. According to the audience costs theory, leaders incur in reputation costs if they escalate a foreign military crisis through the threat of the use of force and then back down. This would prevent democratic leaders from issuing empty threats, making their international commitments more credible than those of their autocratic counterparts. The theory has been developed considering almost always the case of the United States, with basically no research on Europe. However, it is essential to analyse how the European publics react when exposed to a possible foreign policy crisis. We study audience costs, reporting on a set of pre-registered randomised online survey experiments conducted on representative samples in Italy and other three European countries (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom). This paper is one of the first steps in the evaluation of the audience costs theory in parliamentary democracies and has implications for our understanding of the preferences of European citizens on foreign military crises and the enactment of a common defence strategy.
