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2 Reliability and Alliance Behavior We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow In the opening chapter I detailed how scholars have dealt with reputation , and I explored some of the major theories of alliance behavior. I also explained how the business literature treats the effects of a firm’s reputation on its success and have suggested that the influence of a firm’s reputation on the market is comparable to the effect that a state’s reputation has on other states in the international political system. In this chapter I discuss my assumptions as well as the methods used for studying reputation in this book, and then I lay out the hypotheses that are tested in the case study chapters that follow. In general, I contend that a state’s reputation affects its ability to attract new allies and keep existing allies and that it can also influence the design of the alliances it is able to form. First, however, it is necessary to define reputation. Defining Reputation The definition of reputation used here borrows from Jonathan Mercer’s work, but it also identifies some problems with his definition. Defining reputation is relatively simple: the Oxford dictionary says that reputation is “a widespread belief that someone or something has a particular characteristic .”1 Synonyms include credit, repute, and regard. However, defining 1. Angus Stevenson, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Chapter 2 36 the concept in a way that is useful for studying reputation in international politics is more complicated. Other disciplines provide some sense of how reputation is commonly defined by scholars. In the anthropology literature, John Hutson contends that “a man’s reputation is what is said about him. It is the overall response of people to both actor and role performance; an assessment not only of the results achieved but also of the manner in which they were achieved.”2 And one article from the business literature defines reputation as “information about an agent that develops over time from observed behavior about some characteristic of the agent.”3 Despite the slight differences between disciplines, definitions of reputation are generally similar. As such, Mercer’s definition is an appropriate starting point: “Reputation is a judgment of someone’s character (or disposition ) that is then used to predict or explain future behavior.”4 One problem is that Mercer’s definition biases his work against reputation. For one thing, he argues that reputations only form out of an actor’s character (disposition ) and not as a result of situation. He claims that “because a reputation is a judgment about another’s character, only dispositional attributions can generate a reputation.”5 Although he uses this as part of his definition, it is more realistically an assumption, and one that does not appear to be valid. In fact, there are both logical and empirical reasons to relax this assumption and believe that reputations do form out of situations, particularly in international relations. First of all, because of uncertainty actors may be unaware of the situational constraints that influence another actor’s behavior. Consequently, a lack of information might lead observers to attribute situational behavior to a person’s character. Or observers may simply ignore the situation. The fundamental attribution error asserts that people often “underestimate the extent to which behavior is shaped by the constraints of the situation and overestimate the extent to which it is shaped by people’s underlying dispositions.”6 If true, then even if observers are aware of the situational constraints, they could underestimate the power of a situation and therefore assign a reputation to a state. One can also think of practical reasons for relaxing this assumption. Two actors that frequently interact, such as firms and their clients, will have an easier time distinguishing between situation and disposition. As the frequency of contact decreases, the ability to make that distinction also 2. John Hutson, “APolitician in Valloire,” in Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation, ed. F. G. Bailey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 79. 3. Keith Chauvin and James Guthrie, “Labor Market Reputation and the Value of the Firm,” Managerial and Decision Economics 15, no. 6 (November/December 1994), 544. 4. Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 6. 5. Ibid. 6. Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 429. Reliability and Alliance Behavior 37...

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