Previous Commitments and Future Promises : The Relationship between Military Capacity, Alliance Reliability and Future Alliance Potential, 1950-2005

In a recent article, Gibler examines how previous alliance violations affect future alliance potential during a leader’s tenure among dyads (2008). Gibler shows reputation plays a role, however his models do not consider how power and democracy serve as mediating influences on the reputation effects of alliance violation. We argue his theoretical argument fails to address the effects of constraints on involuntary defection from security commitments. Involuntary defection arises from two different but endogenous sources: 1) a lack of tangible military resources and 2) a lack of sufficient domestic support among the principal veto players to fulfill the commitment. Rationalists argue the effects involuntary defection on reputation should be treated differently when considering future cooperation (Chayes & Chayes 1995; Langlois & Langlois 2004). Our interest is in how state reputations, as opposed to leader reputations, are affected by alliance violation with respect to future alliance formation when states violate alliances due to constraints. Thus, we pose the following question: What effects do democracy, military capacity, and previous alliance violation have on future alliance potential for states? Though a crisp set analysis (Ragin 1989, 2000), we examine the effects of reputation, power, and democracy on future alliance commitments on a sample of 60 states in the modern era