Soft Balancing, Binding or Bandwagoning? Understanding Institutional Responses to Power Disparities in the Americas

Abstract

What strategies will states pursue in managing their relations with more powerful neighbours? International Relations scholarship identifies a wide range of policy options open to “secondary states,” including soft balancing, bandwagoning and institutional binding. We provide a conceptual framework to distinguish between these similar and often conflated institutional strategies on the basis of two dimensions: threat perception and inclusiveness. We then apply this framework to the inter-American system. Analyzing original data on treaty action between 1946 and 2015, we find that secondary states’ adherence to multilateral agreements increases when the United States participates and when states do not perceive the hegemon to be a threat. These findings suggest that institutional binding captures the dynamics of inter-American cooperation more adequately than either soft balancing or bandwagoning: states balance against perceived threats but bind their friends.

Enforcing peoples’ right to democracy: transnational activism and regional powers in contemporary Inter-American relations

“…It maintains linkages with and wields leverage over the other member states as well as the OAS Secretariat, which is not only located in Washington next to the White House, but also dependent on US financial contributions (Closa and Casini, 2016). However, the scholarship on inter-American relations has shown that, despite the great asymmetry between the United States and Latin American countries, the United States rarely gets what it wants without the support of key Latin American states that wield great influence on delimited sub-regions, such as Brazil in South America and Mexico in Central America (Levick and Schulz, 2020;Long, 2017;Palestini, 2020;Shaw, 2004).…”

From Balancing to Accommodation: Understanding the Philippines’s Relations with the US and China in Post-Arbitration Period

“…However, when it comes to secondary states strategies new concepts have proliferated, most of them overlapped and often ambiguous terms (Levick and Schulz, 2020). For instance, besides those already mentioned, Mearsheimer (2001) deals with buck-passing -in which the endangered great power tries to get another state to shoulder the burden of deterring or defeating the threatening state; with appeasement or accommodation -in this policy the appeaser aims to modify the behavior of the aggressor by conceding it power, in the hope that this gesture will make the aggressor feel more secure, thus dampening or eliminating its motive for aggression.…”

“…Vol 8 Issue 12 DOI No. : 10.24940/theijhss/2020/v8/i12/HS2012-024 December, 2020 Levick andSchultz (2020 quoting Ikenberry, 2001 3 ) add institutional binding policy -this one happens when states cooperate with the hegemon not because they feel threatened but to achieve mutual gains. Different from balancing in its variants, soft and hard balancing, institutional binding, and accommodation are inclusive policies.…”

“…The strategy employed by secondary states 1 in managing their relations with powerful states has been subject of growing interest in the study of relationships among secondary and powerful states (Greitens, 2016;Levick and Schulz, 2020;Gunasekara;2015). Among the reasons to justify this, the most sounding is the existing myriad of conflated concepts attempting to capture secondary states' strategies with respect to powerful countries (Levick and Schulz, 2020). The boundaries amid the concepts attempting to shed light on secondary states' strategies in coping with powerful states are not always clear.…”