Replication data for: Proactive Reputation Building and Entry Deterrence in International Conflicts

Building on Schelling's (1960; 1966) work concerning reputation and deterrence in international conflict, Clare and Danilovic (2010) hypothesizes that states with reputations for appeasement have a higher propensity to initiate subsequent international disputes to reestablish their reputations for firm resolve. This effect is posited to increase when the state with a "weak" reputation has numerous potential rivals. However, we demonstrate that findings corroborating proactive reputation building are highly model dependent and dissipate when tested with greater rigor. Our analysis of the original model's predictive capability, parameterization of reputation decay, and reliance on implausible counterfactuals highlights the tenuous nature of the proactive reputation building hypothesis. Instead, with the extant data and parameterization of reputation, we test the theoretically prior hypothesis of general entry deterrence--states with "weak" reputations are more susceptible to subsequent challenges by rivals--and find empirical support for a minimal version of the theory.