Democratic Reputations in Crises and War

Many international relations theories argue that leaders and publics use regime type to draw inferences about behavior in conflict, with implications for how democracies act as well as how they are treated by other states. We show that these beliefs can be studied as reputations, and we build a framework around reputations that adhere to regime types and whose content implicates not just resolve but a host of other important attributes and expected behaviors. We put democratic reputations under the microscope, fielding survey experiments on members of the Israeli Knesset as well as six national samples in four democracies. We find strong evidence of democratic reputations' existence and pervasiveness as well as insight into their content. Specifically, we find that the reputations are asymmetric: democracy is seen as considerably and consistently more favorable in war than in crises, suggesting that these regimes may have more difficulty signaling resolve than our theories suggest.