I always seek to focus my research on opportunities to both address important policy issues and make theoretically interesting contributions. Because of this, while Mark Crescenzi makes several great points in his review, I am—most of all—delighted that both of these efforts resonated with him. I am especially pleased, given his own extensive work on reputation, that he thought that the book managed to expand the theoretical concept of reputation in international relations more generally, and that he himself in turn was inspired to raise new theoretical ideas.

I like the questions that Crescenzi raises regarding nongovernmental organizations. To highlight the importance of how reputations operate through third parties, Scorecard Diplomacy explores how NGOs engage with the report. Here, Crescenzi usefully connects to other human rights scholarship on shaming. It is interesting that he asks whether NGOs use the report to convince donors that they are a worthy investment or whether they perhaps fear criticizing the United States. I have not studied this systematically, but some NGOs do get funding from the United States. However, the survey of NGOs, expounded upon in a separate article (“From the Trenches: A Global Survey of Anti-TIP NGOs and Their Views of U.S. Efforts,” Journal of Human Trafficking, 3(3), 2017, with Andrew Heiss) shows that NGO attitudes toward the U.S. TIP policy are uncorrelated with whether they got funding.

My favorite point made by Crescenzi is about the importance of peers in reputation. Drawing on the book’s evidence that state leaders place their own ratings within the context of their peers and react more when their scores are worse than those in their peer group, he wonders whether scholars misspecify models that examine human rights responsiveness with monadic or dyadic research designs. This is a really nice insight. It suggests that we bring an inverse “diffusion”-like perspective to research on reputation-based effects by studying reputational effects in the context of peers. Specially, I like the idea of examining whether states with ratings worse than their peers are more likely to respond.

I am also heartened that Crescenzi takes the book as exemplifying that even if we define reputation as being in the eye of the beholder, it is possible to systematically understand how reputation impacts world politics. While endogeneity is always a challenge, in this case it is mitigated by the fact that the analysis excludes countries that have already criminalized human trafficking and by the fact that poorer ratings are more likely for countries that stall rather than progress. What I agree would help the analysis would be better data on actual trafficking incidence and severity—something that we also sorely lack in order to craft and implement policies and provide services for victims. Still, assessing the effectiveness of scorecard diplomacy as a reputation-based strategy of influence does not depend on this, because it is less about whether the prescribed remedy itself is effective, and more about whether those targeted execute the proposed remedies. Scorecard Diplomacy shows that many indeed do.