Abstract
Reputations for resolve are said to be one of the few things worth fighting for, yet they remain inadequately understood. Discussions of reputation focus almost exclusively on first-order belief change— A stands firm, B updates its beliefs about A’s resolve. Such first-order reputational effects are important, but they are not the whole story. Higher-order beliefs—what A believes about B’s beliefs, and so on—matter a great deal as well. When A comes to believe that B is more resolved, this may decrease A’s resolve, and this in turn may increase B’s resolve, and so on. In other words, resolve is interdependent. We offer a framework for estimating higher-order effects, and find evidence of such reasoning in a survey experiment on quasi-elites. Our findings indicate both that states and leaders can develop potent reputations for resolve, and that higher-order beliefs are often responsible for a large proportion of these effects (40 percent to 70 percent in our experimental setting). We conclude by complementing the survey with qualitative evidence and laying the groundwork for future research.
Highlights
Navigating an international crisis can require incredibly complex inferences
We argue that taking higher-order beliefs into account substantially amplifies the importance of reputations for resolve
We evaluate our theory using a survey experiment conducted on a sample of quasi-elites recruited through Stephen Walt’s Foreign Policy blog
Summary
Navigating an international crisis can require incredibly complex inferences. Even seemingly straightforward strategies can backfire dramatically. B observes A behaving resolutely in some other dispute, and after considering that A might, say, be more militarily capable than B originally thought, B updates his beliefs about A’s resolve We can call this a first-order reputational effect, in which one side updates its beliefs about its opponent’s characteristics or behavioral tendencies solely on the basis of that opponent’s past behavior. The respondent reads the reputational feature of the scenario, State A’s history of crisis interactions This bullet involves two variables: whether A stood firm or backed down in past crises, and whether A’s previous conflicts were against B or other countries.. Respondents have five options, ranging from “very unlikely” (0 percent to 20 percent chance) to “very likely” (80 percent to 100 percent chance) Note that this question exactly matches our definition of resolve in Section “Resolve, Reputation, and Higher-Order Beliefs.”. Given the cost and difficulty in obtaining elite samples, our sampling design is a reasonable first step toward the empirical study of higher-order beliefs in international crises. Importantly, we think it highly unlikely that our sample would produce an opposite effect of reputation on perceived resolve relative to true elites— our respondents may be less attentive to reputation, but this should only depress the magnitude of reputational effects, not reverse their direction
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