Experimental evidence on prestige attribution in international relations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prestige has long been considered an essential component of international relations. Scholars documented the various prestige-seeking strategies states use; nevertheless, demonstrating that a country gained prestige remains challenging. Prestige is based on perceptions held by others, and therefore this project develops an opinion-based rating scale of prestige to examine how countries gain prestige in international relations. This measurement strategy is utilized in a survey experiment to evaluate whether countries can gain prestige from serving as mediators of militarized conflicts. The experimental results show that countries gain prestige from mediating and that the countries with weak power will receive the greatest boost in prestige.