The Posturing Premium: How Empty Threats Can Benefit Leaders in Weak Countries

Abstract

This study examines ‘theatrical’ foreign policy crises, an understudied part of international relations that is especially important among weaker nations. We argue that for less powerful countries often the symbolic statement or threat is the action itself, with parties to a conflict implicitly acknowledging that there is little real bargaining and no real shadow of war. Instead of the traditional audience cost, we hypothesize the opposite: a bump in political approval that accrues to leaders of weak nations when they make empty threats in crises of sovereignty, something we call a “posturing premium.” Examining the case of Southeast Asian nations abutting the South China Sea, we employ five survey experiments across four countries over the course of three original annual survey waves to test this proposition. We find that for foreign policy crises that are linked to sovereignty or national pride, leaders can generate a posturing premium by making threats that they later back down from, in contrast with existing empirical findings related to audience costs. This premium is significantly higher when empty threats are made against a strong adversary, rather than a weak one. However, when foreign policy crises are not plausibly related to sovereignty or territory, the usual audience costs dynamics return; this holds for both real and hypothetical crises. We validate the “weak country” scope condition by conducting an extension in a militarily stronger country, Japan, that does not find a posturing premium for comparable crises.

Cite

@article{sexton2026posturing,
  title = {The Posturing Premium: How Empty Threats Can Benefit Leaders in Weak Countries},
  author = {Renard Sexton and Nico Ravanilla},
  journal = {American Journal of Political Science},
}