US Military Commitment & Audience Costs: Taiwan’s View on the Ukraine-Russia War

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Abstract

Plenty of research focused on domestic audience costs and argued that four different types of costs enable leaders of nations to implement credible signals to their opponents. These four types of costs, tied-hand, sunk, installment, and reduced costs, are effective since the resources, actions, and words that leaders of nations take will affect the national interests and their political careers now and in the future (Fearon, 1997; Quek, 2021). However, nowadays, with the development of communication technology and various types of media, information regarding nations’ various actions will not only be exposed to the public globally in a limited and constable way as in the past. With the Internet, people around the world can easily access information. Several studies also show that citizens of a nation will be willing to defend another nation when the military alliance of these nations is formed due to the moral reason that national leaders will even be considered disqualified by their own citizens if they do not carry out their promise of supporting their allies (Tomz et al., 2023; Tomz & Weeks, 2021). These studies have suggested that public opinion can affect nations’ military actions, and the influence of public opinion is transmissive across national borders.
Beyond the scope of the audience cost that can affect national leaders’ domestic support, this paper extends the theories and argues that national leaders’ promise to one of their allies will also affect the perception of citizens of their other allies and create international audience costs and subsequently affect the future international military collaboration. In other words, nations’ actions will not only generate domestic costs that tie up their hands and affect the installment costs in future operations, but the same actions will also produce similar outcomes for the international audience, who share the national collaboration with the signaling nations.
This article utilizes the case of the U.S. actions taken in the Ukraine-Russia war to survey Taiwanese citizens to study international audience costs. Specifically, this study uses two of the U.S. declarations in support of Ukraine; one is their official verbal support, and the other one is their actions of offering weapons to Ukraine as the treatment to analyze whether (1) the U.S.’s reputation and (2) the approval of Taiwanese government’s cooperation with the U.S. will be affected by the U.S.’s supporting on Ukraine.
This research aims to recruit approximately 1,000 survey participants and utilize the survey experiment to analyze the international audience costs. This research expects that the actions taken by one nation will generate audience costs domestically and internationally. The U.S. government’s decisions on supporting Ukraine will affect Taiwanese citizens’ perspective on the U.S. government and reshape their resolution for the relative future governmental cooperation.

Authors

• Shu-An Tsai, SUNY Buffalo

• Kelly Matush, Florida State University