their audiences for why they backed down from a threat, thus reducing the audience costs. 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. Criticisms 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. They constructed their own dataset specifically for interstate military threats and outcomes, which found no relationship between regime type and effective threats. 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." Other scholars have disputed the democratic credibility argument and questioned its causal logic and empirical validity. Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard argue that there is no evidence of audience costs in any post-1945 crises, leaders rarely make unambiguous threats, publics care about policy substance (not leader consistency in rhetoric and action), and publics care about the country's honor (not whether the leader issued an explicit threat). They add that in cases of audience costs beong observed, it is frequently when the public is hawkish and pushes leaders to adopt hardline stances and actions. It is unclear whether the domestic costs in those cases is because leaders fear getting caught bluffing, or they just do not want to defy a hawkish public. A 2021 study found that Americans perceived democracies to be more likely to back down in crises, which contradicts the expectations of the audience costs literature. A 2011 study argued that domestic audiences in democratic states were less capable of punishing leaders for backing down because democratic leaders have larger "winning coalitions." A 2012 study by Marc Trachtenberg, which analyzed a dozen great power crises, found no evidence of the presence of audience costs in these crises. A 2005 study, which used a formal bargaining model, found that in situations of both sides issuing public threats, a "prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands." According to a 2021 study by Jayme R. Schlesinger and Jack