Reputation and Interstate Conflict (Of Friends and Foes)

In international politics, states learn from the behavior of other states, including the reputations states form through their actions in the international system. I develop a model of how states process this information and examine how this learning affects international conflict. The model builds off of cognitive balance theory and foreign policy learning models, and breaks new ground in its ability to provide a contextual assessment of reputation in world politics. I then investigate whether a dyad is more likely to experience conflict if at least one of the states has a reputation for hostility. This hypothesis is tested empirically across all dyads in the international system from 1817-2000. The results indicate that states do engage in this learning behavior, and that the information generated by extra-dyadic interaction of states has a significant bearing upon the likelihood of dyadic conflict. ∗A previous draft of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28–August 31, 2003. Thanks to Andrew Enterline, Kelly Kadera, Stephen Long and Jake Kathman for comments. Special thanks to George Rabinowitz for his comments and help with data preparation and fortran programming, to Tae Lerch for his help with the Perl program. Empirical analysis was conducted using STATA 8.0 (StataCorp, 2003). Thanks to the COW2 Project and to John Oneal, Bruce Russett, and Michael Berbaum for making their data available. Data assembly was conducted with the help of EUGene 3.0.3 (Bennett and Stam, 2000). The author is grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting this research (SES-0450111). Any errors remain the responsibility of the author.