[4][5] The term was popularized in a 1994 academic article by James Fearon in which he argued that democracies carry greater audience costs than authoritarian states, which makes them better at signaling their intentions in interstate disputes.
[19] Branislav Slantchev, Matthew Baum and Philip Potter have argued that the presence of the free media is a key component of audience costs.
[22] Roseanne McManus finds support for the existence of audience costs but argues that the credibility of a threat necessarily also relies on the threatener's military strength, hawkishness of domestic veto players, and leaders' security in office.
[23] However, a 2012 study by Alexander B. Downes and Todd S. Sechser found that existing datasets were not suitable to draw any conclusions as to whether democratic states issued more effective threats.
[4] A 2017 study that recoded flaws in the MID dataset ultimately concluded " that there are no regime-based differences in dispute reciprocation, and prior findings may be based largely on poorly coded data.
[19] They add that in cases of audience costs being observed, it is frequently when the public is hawkish and pushes leaders to adopt hardline stances and actions.
[29][30] Research by Jessica Chen Weiss argued that the Chinese regime fomented or clamped down on nationalist (or anti-foreign) protests in China to signal resolve.
Shuhei Kurizaki,[32] Austin Carson,[33] Keren Yarhi-Milo,[34] and Levenotoglu and Tarar[28] have argued that secret operations, threats, and agreements can reduce inadvertent escalation to war by insulating leaders from the domestic backlash that would have occurred if the diplomacy had been conducted in public.
Narcissistic leaders can, in some cases, exploit audience costs to force uncooperative branches of government into action by swinging public opinion.