Leaders throughout history have been concerned--often obsessed--with how other leaders perceive them. Historians have argued that many wars have been fought for purposes of reputation, honor, status, and prestige. However, there is little systematic study of these phenomena, and specifically of the effects of concern for reputation for resolve on interstate conflict behavior. After precisely defining resolve, and reputation for resolve, this dissertation examines this question by developing a family of formal models of escalation and reputation-engagement. From these models I explicitly deduce four testable implications of variation in concern for reputation for resolve that take selection effects into account and are robust to a variety of assumptions.
To test these implications I search for research designs where concern for reputation is manipulated in a manner that is reasonably well-understood, and in which large unknown biases are unlikely. I find two such designs. The first, analyzed in collaboration with Devin Caughey, compares U.S. conflict behavior depending on whether the president is from the U.S. South. The U.S. South has a "culture of honor" that places greater importance on an individual's reputation for resolve. Using permutation inference and NPC, a technique new to political science, to provide a joint statistical test of the predictions, we find that conflict behavior under Southern presidents is substantially and significantly different from non-Southern presidents in a manner predicted by my theory. Furthermore, this difference remains significant under a large number of matched comparisons. This result is unlikely to be spurious because of its robustness to conditioning and because of theoretical and empirical inconsistencies in the alternative accounts.
The second research design compares the conflict behavior of leaders early in their time- in-office with those same leaders later in their time-in-office. Leaders at the start of their tenure, as compared with themselves later in their career, should care more about their reputations because they have less developed reputations and longer time horizons. Each prediction of my theory is examined and finds statistically significant support with relatively large effect sizes. Alternative potential explanations are systematically ruled out through critical tests. In summary, the results from a set of clear tests of the effect of concern for reputation are consistent with the strongest claims made in the literature: concern for reputation seems to be an extremely important cause of war.
