Reputation, History, and War

Abstract

This article investigates the role of direct and reputational information in the onset of interstate war. Scholars have recently identified the importance of separating the phenomenon of conflict from the rare event of war. Building on earlier work concerning the role of reputation and history in the onset of militarized interstate disputes, this article argues that states in crises face competing pressures brought on by their history of interactions with their opponents and their opponents' reputations generated through interactions with other states. While historical conflict reveals private information regarding the credibility of state demands, this history also generates constraints upon the ability of governments to seek peaceful resolutions to the current crisis. An empirical analysis supports the hypothesis that both a direct history of conflict within the dyad and reputational histories for conflict increase the likelihood of war onset. These results hold for a sample including all dyads 1817—2000 and a sample including politically relevant dyads in the same period. The results also suggest that contiguous states are more likely to go to war with each other, as are pairs of major powers, while democracies and pairs of minor powers are less likely to go to war with each other. These results support previous findings on the influence of these factors on the likelihood of war onset.

Civil War Diffusion and Regional Motivations for Intervention

“…Representing these phenomena in our theoretical and empirical models provides a more accurate representation of intervention. In addition, this research provides support for a growing literature on the importance of accounting for extra-dyadic information in our models of interstate phenomena (e.g., see Crescenzi, Kathman, and Long 2007;Crescenzi et al 2011). The scientific study of conflict is rather dependent upon the dyad, both empirically and theoretically, producing explanations of conflict that rely heavily upon interactions between pairs of states.…”

Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation1

“…Reputation as a motivator of state behavior has received growing attention in international relations research. Similar to arguments in economics about the behavior of firms in the marketplace, scholars have invoked processes of reputation formation and learning to explain phenomena as diverse as military deterrence (Schelling 1966;Alt, Calvert and Humes 1988;Huth 1988;Nalebuff 1991), recurring conflict (Leng 1983(Leng , 1988Diehl and Goertz 2000;Crescenzi 2007;Crescenzi et al 2007), multilateral cooperation (Milgrom, North and Weingast 1990;Downs and Jones 2002), and international lending (Simmons 2000;Simmons and Elkins 2004;Tomz 2007). Yet the depth of analysis and theory building on the role of reputation in international relations scholarship is scant compared to the attention it has received in the business and economics literature.…”

“…At its most basic, a ijt is simply an aggregation of the set of alliance histories at time t that state j has with all the states in the system that are not i. It is important to note that the (Crescenzi 2007;Crescenzi, Kathman and Long 2007). 12 In this research, the pool of potential alliance partners is every state in the international system.…”

“…11 11 Our model draws on previous research that considers the effect of extra‐dyadic reputations on the likelihood of interstate conflict (Crescenzi 2007; Crescenzi, Kathman and Long 2007). …”

“…27 27 For example, work on interstate rivalry (Diehl and Goertz 2000), state learning (Leng 2000), and recent research on historic information and state reputations (Crescenzi 2007; Crescenzi et al. 2007) all point to the importance of past events in shaping future phenomena. …”