Keep Your Enemies Closer : Legislative Competitiveness and Signaling
A substantial body of research argues that democratic regimes are better able to generate audience costs, which allows them to make more credible threats. Weeks (2008) recently challenged this finding, offering evidence that some types of nondemocratic regimes may be just as successful in generating audience costs as democracies. This paper also extends the logic of audience costs to nondemocratic regimes, but the mechanism for generating such costs is substantially different from Weeks's. The theory posits that legislatures, even in nondemocratic regimes, meet the requirements necessary to generate audience costs. Further, according to the theory, competition in obtaining legislative office is all that is necessary for audience costs to play a role. This theory is tested statistically and the results show that legislative competitiveness has a substantial impact on the likelihood that threats are viewed credibly by target states. Further, legislative competitiveness is more significant than regime type or executive elements of democracy in determining whether a challenge is credible