Collaborative Research: How International Reputation Accrues across Multiple Policy Domains

When two states face off in an international crisis, why does one state believe that its rival will capitulate, rather than escalate to war? Recent research suggests specific past actions – such as fighting in past crises or honoring alliance commitments – influence a state’s reputation as resolved to fight. Yet past studies have explored just one determinant of reputation in isolation from the others.

This project will develop a comprehensive theoretical framework to explain which actions, or combinations of actions, matter most for building a reputation. It will also collect new data on cross-national historical events and cross-national survey data to establish which past foreign and domestic policy choices by states influence their likelihood of facing military challenges and the outcomes of international crises.

This project advances U.S. national security in two ways. First, it will help to identify periods of heighted risk to U.S. interests by showing which specific domestic and foreign policy choices can create the impression of weak U.S. resolve. Second, it will explain how reputational damage from avoiding international conflict in one instance can be offset by other choices, such as alliance commitments or even domestic political actions.

This means that the U.S. does not need to engage in every possible conflict in order to sustain a reputation as resolved to fight in future disputes.

This project is the first to investigate how international reputations accumulate through many different past actions. Instead of simply studying whether past actions matter, it will provide a framework for assessing how much different actions matter relative to each other, and how they work in combination. The framework will bridge the gap between rationalist and psychological studies of reputation by using formal theory to predict how much actions that reveal certain psychological attributes will contribute to perceptions of resolve.

The investigators will test expectations in a rigorous, multi-method manner. They will use U.S. and international survey experiments to provide causal estimates of the relative reputational impact of various actions. They will use quantitative coding of declassified intelligence documents, qualitative case studies, and interviews with U.S. officials to illuminate how elites utilize their rival’s diverse actions to estimate their rival’s resolve.

Finally, they will collect novel cross-national data to understand which past actions influence reputations across history.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.