Who Punishes Leaders for Lying About the Use of Force? Evaluating The Microfoundations of Domestic Deception Costs

• Author: Keren Yarhi-Milo,David T. Ribar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221118808
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2023, Vol. 67(4) 559–586

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221118808

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Who Punishes Leaders for

Lying About the Use of Force?

Evaluating The

Microfoundations of Domestic

Deception Costs

Keren Yarhi-Milo

1

and David T. Ribar

2

Abstract

It is a common stereotype that leaders lie, but for all our beliefs about how normal it is

for a president to lie to the public we know next to nothing about how voters might

actually view this conduct. Drawing from literature in behavioral economics, we

theorize that voters apply their attitudes towards interpersonal lies when judging

leaders, with people who see lying as more socially acceptable being less willing to

punish leaders for exhibiting this behavior. Using a novel vignette-style survey ex-

periment, we f‌ind strong support for our theory: despite widespread willingness to

punish leaders who lie, individuals high in Machiavellianism and Self-Monitoring are far

less willing to punish presidents for lying than their low-type peers, and in some cases

do not punish at all. Using robustness checks and causal mediation analysis, we conf‌irm

that views regarding the moral acceptability of lying drive responses to presidential

deception.

Keywords

foreign policy, use of force, domestic politics, interstate conf‌lict

1

Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

2

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Keren Yarhi-Milo, Political Science, Columbia University, 1326 International Affairs Building, School of

International and Public Affairs (SIPA), New York, NY 10024, USA.

Email: ky218@columbia.edu

Introduction

Although lying is unethical, it is a common feature of our social environment. It is also a

feature of our politics and is endemic to the political behavior of our leaders, even

democratically elected ones. Leaders see deception as a convenient tool that can be used

towards a variety of foreign policy ends: selling a war to the public, protecting national

prestige or security, and even illicit personal gain. But for all we know about why

leaders might lie, we still know little about how acceptable these lies are to the voters

who democratic leaders ostensibly serve. Given that voters are the ones called upon to

either sanction or reward leaders’behavior, understanding their reactions to lying and

the mechanisms underlying these reactions is essential to fully understanding the

strategic calculus leaders face when deciding whether to deceive or be truthful with

their publics on international affairs. This paper offers the most in-depth examination to

date of the individual psychological factors that shape voters’responses to leaders’

foreign policy lies –the micro-foundations of deception costs.

International relations literature would lead us to expect that leaders who are caught

lying on consequential issues of national security and the use of force would suffer

severe political costs for their deception, despite foreign policy being the arena where

leaders traditionally have the greatest degree of deference from their publics (Bennett

and Paletz 1994). This is because such lies could damage their nation’s credibility,

compound the already-high costs of a war, or lead the country into intractable or

otherwise inadvisable conf‌licts. These expectations have been conf‌irmed by recent

experimental research f‌inding that dishonesty does indeed generate backlash among

voters (Maxey 2021).

At the same time, a burgeoning literature on the moral and psychological foun-

dations of public opinion on issues of foreign policy, as well as a rich literature in

behavioral economics and social psychology on deception in social contexts, imply that

our expectations regarding voters’reactions should be more nuanced; that different

types of voters should be differentially willing to impose costs on presidents who lie on

issues of national security and the use of force. Drawing on insights from these lit-

eratures, we advance a novel micro-foundational theory about the sources of domestic

deception costs - the policy and political costs citizens are willing to impose on their

leaders for lying. Weargue that while the revelation of such lies should still lead citizens

to impose domestic deception costs in the aggregate, voters’predispositions towards

lying in their own personal lives should signif‌icantly moderate their individual will-

ingness to impose these costs. We expect that voters who are predisposed towards, and

inclined to accept, lying in their own interpersonal relationships will be signif‌icantly

less willing to hold their elected leaders accountable for lies, even when these lies

involve the use of military force.

We identify two psychological predispositions where deceptive behavior is known

to be a salient feature: Machiavellianism (a personality trait involving a predisposi tion

towards manipulation and deceit) and High Self-Monitoring (referring to a personality

trait that involves manipulative and strategic self-representation).

1

We add to these a

560 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 67(4)