According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie their hands by publicly threatening to use force since domestic publics punish leaders who say one thing and do another. We argue here that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent (the traditional audience cost), and for threatening to use force in the first place (a belligerence cost). We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader's constituency.

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(Hattem 2015). His assessment was condemned from across the political spectrum, from critics on both the left (including then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) and right (including then GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum). Similar public debates erupted following other violent incidents, including the bombing at the Boston Marathon and shooting in Orlando, Florida. These debates highlight not only the contentiousness of classifying terrorism, but also the stakes involved in doing so, for policy makers, academics, and members of the public alike. In this article, we turn to experimental methods to explain the tenor of these public debates. We investigate terrorism in a public opinion context not because we believe that the mass public's intuitions can necessarily resolve normative debates about what should or should not be considered terrorism, but rather because of the central role that public opinion plays in our understanding of how terrorism works. In a vast array of prior research, terrorism is understood as a form of violence that functions by attracting public attention. It is because terrorism hinges on public reaction that Margaret Thatcher suggested terrorists depend on "the oxygen of publicity," that Carlo Pisacane declared terrorism to be "propaganda by deed," and that Ayman al-Zawahiri suggested that for al-Qaeda, media coverage is "more than half" the battle (Smith and Walsh 2013, 312). If the responses of ordinary citizens constitute a central causal mechanism through which terrorism operates, it logically follows that understanding what ordinary citizens think terrorism is is a crucial prerequisite to understanding how they react to it.

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If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite-driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue-taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top-down models claim. . Thanks to Kyle Dropp for his assistance with fielding Experiments 1-2. Kertzer acknowledges the support of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. series of polls found that Democrats and Republicans in the public were divided. In a Pew poll conducted July 24-27, 60% of Republicans blamed Hamas for the violence, whereas Democrats were split, with 29% blaming Hamas, and 26% blaming Israel. A Gallup poll conducted July 22-23 detected a similar pattern: 65% of Republicans thought Israel's actions were justified, but Democrats were divided, as 31% backed the Israeli response, and 47% called it unjustified. This pattern-where political elites are united but the public is divided-is particularly interesting for political scientists because it violates the assumptions of a commonly held theory about public opinion, in which the public knows relatively little about foreign affairs and thus structures its beliefs by taking cues from trusted, partisan elites-a top-down process in which members of the public adeptly swallow whatever their preferred elite cue-givers feed them. Yet if the mass public knows so little and can only regurgitate carefully pureed talking points, why does it often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that partisan elite