How Leader-Specific Reputations Form and Change across Repeated Interactions
How Leader-Specific Reputations Form and Change across Repeated Interactions
This chapter examines how perceptions of a leader's resolve form and change across multiple hypothetical interactions. By using a survey experiment, it reveals that statements create expectations of future action, which then interact with a leader's subsequent behavior to influence participants' perceptions of that leader's resolve. The results further show that early perceptions of a leader's resolve are significantly correlated with participants' later assessments of that leader's resolve, indicating that early interactions and the perceptions that stem from those interactions are highly influential to leader-specific reputational assessments within the experiment. In other words, first impressions matter, as they influence later assessments. Moreover, only certain contextual factors—namely, a preexisting state reputation and state strategic interest in the issue under dispute—create expectations of leader resolve within the experiment. These expectations then interact with a leader's statements and behavior to influence participants' assessments of resolve.
Keywords: political leaders, political resolve, leader statements, reputational assessments, first impressions, state reputation, state interest, leader behavior
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