Accommodation and Reputation

Recent years have been marked by a surge in defections from cooperative arrangements, as states increasingly abrogate or violate international commitments. Yet, existing theories of international cooperation do not adequately explain the incentives and motivations of states as they formulate responses to such behavior. We argue that reputational dynamics are central to understanding how states respond to defection, and that reputation operates through two distinct channels. First, violations damage the offending state’s reputation for upholding commitments, reducing victims’ and observers’ appetite for future cooperation. Second, states that fail to punish violations risk damaging their own reputation for toughness, creating incentives to confront rather than tolerate defection. Two pre-registered survey experiments test these mechanisms. A conjoint experiment on the American public shows that a partner’s past violations have a larger effect on support for cooperation than any other feature of a prospective agreement, including the gains at stake, ease of monitoring, and regime type. Leadership turnover in the offending state partially — but not fully — offsets this reputational damage. A vignette experiment on UK respondents demonstrates that tolerating violations generates significant reputational and material costs, including among observers not directly harmed, and that these costs persist even when the violator is much more powerful. Together, these results suggest noncompliance creates dual reputational pressures that simultaneously raise the cost of future cooperation for violators and discourages accommodation as a viable response.