How Leaders Establish Reputations for Resolve

This chapter investigates how individual leaders establish reputations for resolve. In doing so, it is critical to consider how a leader's own statements and behavior as well as key contextual factors, such as state reputation or immediate determinants of conflict, influence these reputational assessments. The chapter theorizes that a leader's statements and behavior directly contribute to their reputation for resolve in three ways. First, due to the effects of leadership transitions, a leader's statements of resolve will be more influential to their reputation early during their tenure rather than later. Second, a leader's statements and behavior together influence reputational assessments, as a leader's statements of resolve create expectations of future behavior that then interact with a leader's subsequent actions to inform their reputation. Third, due to an initial lack of information about a leader's resolve, early perceptions of resolve will influence later perceptions, making reputations difficult to change once established. The chapter also considers how four key contextual factors identified by reputation skeptics and supporters—namely, state reputation, relative power, state interest, and regime type—condition leader-specific reputations for resolve.