How International Reputation Matters: Revisiting Alliance Violations in Context

We investigate the role of international reputation in alliance politics by developing a signaling theory linking past alliance violations with the formation of future alliance commitments. In our theory, past violations are useful signals of future alliance reliability conditional on whether they effectively separate reliable from unreliable alliance partners. It follows that states evaluating potential alliance partners will interpret past violations in their context when deciding to enter a new alliance, attaching less weight to violations in “harder-times”, when many states are defaulting on their alliance commitments together, and more weight to violations in “easier-times”, when fewer states are defaulting on their alliances. We test our theory and find that states are empirically more likely to form new alliances with states that violated in harder-times compared to states that violated in easier-times. The results have important implications for how scholars understand and estimate the impact of international reputation.