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Does President Trump face domestic costs for foreign policy inconsistency? Will co-partisans and opposition-partisans equally punish Donald Trump for issuing flippant international threats and backing down? While the president said he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters, the literature consistently shows that individuals, regardless of partisanship, disapprove of leaders who jeopardize the country’s reputation for credibility and resolve. Given the atypical nature of the Trump presidency, and the severe partisan polarization surrounding it, we investigate whether the logic of audience costs still applies in the Trump era. Using a unique experiment fielded during the 2016 presidential transition, we show that Republicans and Democrats impose equal audience costs on President Trump. And by varying the leader’s identity, between Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and “The President,” we demonstrate that the public adheres to a non-partisan logic in punishing leaders who renege on threats. Yet we also find Presidents Trump and Obama can reduce the magnitude of audience costs by justifying backing down as being “in America’s interest.” Even Democrats, despite their doubts of Donald Trump’s credibility, accept such justifications. Our findings encourage further exploration of partisan cues, leader-level attributes, and leader-level reputations.

Reification – the act of treating something socially created as if it were real – is often described as a problem in the study of international norms. Critical and post-colonial scholars argue that reification silences alternative worldviews, whereas practice-oriented scholars argue it diminishes agency and practical innovation. In his article ‘From Norms to Normative Configurations,’ Simon Pratt proposes a solution to the problem of reification, reconceiving norms as a configuration of interrelated social practices. In this piece, I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Reification is an essential part of how norms are constructed, contested, and surmounted in international politics. I revisit the foundational figures in norms research to highlight problems in Pratt's analysis, and prove the value of reification, both analytically and methodologically. Then, I use these insights to amend the concept of normative configuration, redefining it as a complex network of discrete norms tied together through common social practices. Along the way, I offer directions for future research on the relationship between norms and practices.

How do policymakers discover their energy security interests abroad? Conventional wisdom assumes states have an inherent interest in securing an affordable and steady supply of oil. In this paper, I show that policymakers often fail to realize such vital interests on their own. Instead, multinational actors like international oil corporations (IOCs) educate policymakers on their state’s security interests abroad. By integrating prior scholarship on corporate power with insights on lobbying in American politics, I theorize that multinational corporations like IOCs can influence security policy when two conditions are met: first, policymakers demand information on security policy because of issue complexities, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and structural holes in the international system; and second, these corporations possess social ties that grant them the access, trust, and legitimacy to supply those policymakers with information. In the context of energy security, IOCs provide information on foreign sources of oil, threats posed to access, and anticipatory strategies for protecting access. I apply the theory to the origins of U.S. lend-lease aid to Saudi Arabia in 1943. Through sequential analysis, process-tracing, and comparative counterfactual reasoning, I argue an American IOC hastened U.S. interests in securing Saudi oil by using its ties to lobby the Roosevelt Administration at a time when the Administration lacked information on the country. The theory and findings broaden the state-centric view of energy security, contribute new evidence to historiography on US–Saudi relations, and fill an important gap in our understanding of corporate lobbying in security policy.