Credibility in compliance and punishment: Leader specific punishments and credibility

The ability of nation A to compel nation B to grant it concessions depends upon the credibility with which A can commit to punish B for noncompliance. Discarding traditional unitary actor approaches, we assume policy in each nation is set by mortal political leaders and model the compliance/punishment relation between A and B in a noisy infinitely repeated setting. If nations utilize leader specific punishment, that is target policies against leaders rather than the nations they represent, then leaders improve the credibly of their threats to punish noncompliance since citizens have incentives to depose leaders to restore national integrity.