Brewster: Unpacking the State's Reputation

Rachel Brewster (Harvard Univ. - Law) has posted Unpacking the State's Reputation. Here's the abstract:

International law scholars debate when international rules matter to states and what affects compliance. One of the few areas of agreement is that fairly robust levels of compliance can be achieved by tapping into states' concerns with their reputation. The logic is intuitively appealing: a state that violates international law develops a bad reputation, which leads other states to exclude the violator from future cooperative opportunities. Anticipating a loss of future gains, states will often comply with international rules that are not in their immediate interests. The level of compliance that reputation can sustain depends, however, on how the government decision-makers value the possibility of being excluded from future cooperative agreements. This paper examines how governments internalize reputational costs to the "state" and how audiences evaluate the predictive value of violating governments' actions. The paper concludes that reputation, as currently conceived, is unlikely to be a robust source of compliance.