Identity and Reputations in World Politics

• In Event: International Reputation Reimagined: Cooperation, Complexity, and Contestation

Abstract

The study of reputations in IR is an incredibly rich, productive area, yet scholarship on reputational inferences has thus far left out one of the most striking features of human psychology: identity. Categorizing others as either “us” or “them” is an automatic and pervasive process that has significant implications for how we view others and understand their behavior, and thus for how reputations are generated, updated, and maintained. We provide a theoretical framework—based on social identity theory—to explain how identity dynamics affect both how we perceive other actors' ``type" and estimate their likely behavior; in short, their reputations. Empirically, we designed experiments that test implications of our identity-based theory of reputations, and demonstrate the importance of ingroup/outgroup dynamics in the generation and maintenance of reputations. In service of that goal, we also provide some of the first descriptive evidence from surveys fielded on both elite foreign policy professionals and the U.S. public on (1) which social identities and groups matter in IR (2), which countries are seen as ingroups and outgroup (and why), and (3) the reputations of more abstract identity categories (e.g., ``democracies" or ``the West").

Authors

• Ryan M. Powers, University of Georgia

• Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison