Reputational Analysis

Reputational analysis is a method that has been used by some researchers to measure reputation, a key power resource. It was used first in the analysis of urban politics as a way to establish which local actors were most influential in any given community. The rise of electronic resources that indicate the extent to which individuals and organizations are visible, known, and influential means that there is now considerably more scope than ever before to estimate the reputation of policy actors. This entry reviews the rise and fall of reputational analysis as a way of measuring the potential power of political actors and considers how widespread use of the Internet could reinstate the concept.

Reputational analysis was most popular in community power studies carried out in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. It involved assessing the reputation of local policy actors by asking other actors who they believed to be most influential in a given locality. The original way of carrying out reputational analysis (as used, for example, by Floyd Hunter in his study of urban elites in Atlanta, Georgia) was to compile a list of potential influential individuals, who were then asked to rank other members of the list according to the likelihood of their influencing a series of issues. Those receiving the highest rankings were then interviewed and asked for their list of influential persons, continuing the ranking process; the members of the final nominated subset were then described. Hunter worked to identify individual actors with general influence, but other researchers (such as Terry N. Clark) have studied actors who are influential in specific areas or in specific social and political networks. The method was favored for its simplicity of design and the potential for replication and was further used to specify reputational networks of influence in various policy settings.

Reputational analysis was much criticized at the time, particularly by pluralists, who argued that the selection of the list was biased and that the results merely reflected a commonly held view of the most powerful individuals in a locality, rather than bearing any relation to the actual distribution of power. Others have argued that there is evidence that perceived and actual influence are highly correlated; if an actor is perceived to be powerful, then that perception is a resource in itself and part of his or her reputation. But the strongest critics of reputational analysis, such as Robert A. Dahl, argued that decisional analysis, in which a number of key issues are selected, participants in decision making identified, behavior studied, and relative influence appraised in identified outcomes, was more effective in establishing “who governs.” The two techniques tend to produce different results; later authors have combined both approaches to obtain a more complete picture.

However, more recently, two developments have led to a reinstatement of the concept. First, the development of the rational choice perspective within political science, applying economic methods to political behavior, reinstated the concept of reputational analysis. In economics, reputation is a central concept in bargaining theory, and firms dedicate massive resources to safeguarding their reputations, including the employment of public relations firms describing their expertise as “reputation management.” From this perspective, where policy actors (such as political leaders, states, organizations, or interest groups) are engaged in strategic interactions with others, the possession of a powerful reputation is identified as a key power resource along with authority, information, and monetary incentives.

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