Public opinion is central to our understanding of international politics. The idea that the public will punish leaders who adopt unpopular policies has been used to explain, among other things, why threats are extraordinarily rare, how bargaining can lead to inefficient wars, and why leaders withdraw from foreign engagements. A common assumption in this literature is that public preferences can be reduced to a single, median, position without loss of generality. This assumption is warranted whenever public preferences are single-peaked. However, scholars have repeatedly found that foreign policy preferences are commonly double-peaked in individuals and at the level of the public as a whole.

This line of research investigates how different distributions of preferences shape leaders’ incentives to adopt specific policies and their credibility for doing so.