“…Similarly, both formal theorists and empirical IR scholars have noted that actors vary in their sensitivity to costs: Mueller (1980) suggests that one of the American strategic failures in the Vietnam War was assumption that sufficient costs would push the North Vietnamese past their "breaking point"; Pape (1996) similarly notes that states vary in their vulnerability to coercion, Jervis (1976, 51) refers to states varying in their "willingness to pay," while Rosen (1972) argues that states vary in their "willingness to suffer." 13 Two of the dominant research traditions in the democracies in war literature -the "selection effects" work that predicts that democracies are more likely to win their wars because they are more cautious in choosing which wars are worth fighting (Siverson, 1995;Reiter and Stam, 1998b;Valentino, Huth, and Croco, 2010), and the literature investigating whether the advantages of democracy in battle decline over time because democratic publics are too casualty-shy to sustain lengthy combat operations (Bennett and Stam, 1998;Gartzke, 2001;Reiter and Stam, 2002;Sullivan, 2007Sullivan, , 2008Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, 2009;Lyall, 2010) -both acknowledge the importance not just of costs, but of cost sensitivity. In much of the literature, the issue is not whether democracies have higher costs of war than autocracies (although see Schultz 1999), but how tolerant they are of the costs.…”