Signaling Resolve: Leaders, Reputations, and the Importance of Early Interactions

How do leaders develop reputations for resolve across repeated interactions? While scholars find that leaders can acquire individual reputations for resolve, we know relatively little about how these leader-specific reputations form to begin with. This article examines how leaders develop reputations for resolve from the very beginning of their tenures and present three key hypotheses regarding these leader-specific reputations. First, statements are more influential to reputational assessments during initial interactions. Second, statements create expectations of future behavior, which interact with a leader’s subsequent actions to influence reputation development. Third, initial perceptions of resolve significantly condition later assessments. Through a process tracing survey experiment, I find evidence that resolute statements are more substantively influential during early interactions. I also find early perceptions of resolve do significantly influence later perceptions. Furthermore, statements create expectations of future behavior, and it is by meeting or defying these expectations that a leader’s reputation for resolve is improved or injured within the experiment. These results remain robust even when controlling for contextual factors, including state characteristics. The implications of these findings for both scholars and policy makers are discussed, and this study illustrates how individual leaders develop these reputations for resolve across interactions.