Credibility of public and private diplomatic signals

What is it about?

Scholars have long debated whether public threats are more credible and effective than private threats. However, most of these arguments have used only game theory or historical case studies. Applying computational text methods on 18,000 declassified documents from the Berlin Crisis of 1958 to 1963, we find that private diplomatic signals are more precise and credible than public diplomatic signals.

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Why is it important?

Our findings challenge widely-held views about the importance of public diplomatic signals, which find their foundations in classic costly signaling research by Thomas Schelling. Our empirical approach shows how computational methods can be fruitfully combined with archival research.