Status and World Order

Larson, Deborah Welch; Paul, T. V.; Wohlforth, William C.

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107444409.002

Cited by 135 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…23 Work on foreign policy analysis, social identity theory, and evolutionary approaches have come to similar conclusions regarding the importance of status concerns for 15. Larson, Paul, andWohlforth 2014, 16. 16.…”

Section: Status Threats In International Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Losing Face and Sinking Costs: Experimental Evidence on the Judgment of Political and Military Leaders

Renshon¹

2015

Int Org

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Status has long been implicated as a critical value of states and leaders in international politics. However, decades of research on the link between status and conflict have yielded divergent findings, and little evidence of a causal relationship. I attempt to resolve this impasse by shifting the focus from status to relative status concerns in building a theory of status from the ground up, beginning with its behavioral microfoundations. I build on and extend previous work through an experimental study of status threats and the escalation of commitment, operationalized here as a new behavioral escalation task using real financial incentives and framed around a narrative of war and peace. I utilize a unique sample of high-profile political and military leaders from the Senior Executive Fellow (SEF) program at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a group of demographically matched control subjects, allowing me to evaluate the moderating effect of power on status concerns while also addressing typical concerns about external validity in IR experiments. I find strong evidence that the fear of losing status impedes decision making and increases the tendency to "throw good money after bad," but that power aids decision making by buffering high-power subjects against the worst effects of status loss.A large body of research in international relations (IR) has suggested the importance of status concerns for international conflict. Status-standing in a hierarchy-has been a critical component of both realist and evolutionary theories, as well as empirical work on status inconsistency, power transition theory, and social identity and dominance theory. 1 It has also featured in international political economy (IPE), often as one of the "less tangible payoffs" sought by states. 2 I am especially grateful for the thoughtful comments and suggestions from

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Section: Status Threats In International Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Losing Face and Sinking Costs: Experimental Evidence on the Judgment of Political and Military Leaders

Renshon¹

2015

Int Org

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“…Can the EU's high positional status be cashed in for power and influence? High status, according to a seminal work in the field, ‘confers tangible benefits in the form of decision‐making autonomy and deference on the part of others concerning issues of importance, including but not limited to security and prosperity’ (Larson et al ., , pp. 18–19).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The EU has not only stuff like money, bureaucratic institutions, identity and personnel but also social status. Social status positions an actor in a group or social hierarchy based on the shared and often mute acknowledgement of that actor's attributes on a rank of prestige (Larson et al ., , p. 7). Status is thus often related to material power but it cannot be reduced to it.…”

Section: The Social Status Of the Eumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Actors who receive thick recognition have already received enough thin recognition to partake in the games inside the status club. Positional status is thus similar to the normal conception of status in international relations; namely, a ‘collective belief about a given state's ranking on valued attributes’ (Larson et al ., , p. 7). Here, positional status is conceived of as an element in a hierarchy among powers, often accompanied by the prefixes small, middle, great or super (de Carvalho and Neumann, ; Mattern and Zarakol, , pp.…”

Section: The Social Status Of the Eumentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Social Status of the European Union

Røren

2019

J of Common Market Studies

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In this article I analyse the EU's social status in world politics. I argue that recognition grants the EU both club and positional status. Drawing on existing literature on status in international relations, I conceptualize the diplomatic corps of various polities as the embodied recognition of their positional status in world politics. To indicate and measure the positional status of the EU, I applied social network analysis to data on the exchange of embassies from 1960 to 2010. This methodology allows for consistent longitudinal comparisons of standing between heterogeneous polities in world politics. The results indicate that the EU's rise in the status hierarchy has been meteoric since 1960. However, fear of status congestion and status dilution among countries has thwarted the EU's full inclusion into the various status clubs of nation-states. I show that due to its lack of full club status the EU struggles to convert its high positional status into influence.

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“…Author's note: Many thanks to Matt Evangelista, Stefano Guzzini, Jonathan Kirshner, Reinhard Wolf, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of International Studies Quarterly for helpful comments. 1 For overviews, see Dafoe et al (2014) and Larson et al (2014). The expansion of this literature has taken place within the context of growing interest in social hierarchy in international relations more broadly.…”

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confidence: 99%

Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics

Ward

2017

International Studies Quarterly

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Chinese and Russian foreign policy, in part, reflects both countries' ambitions for higher status in the international system. This implies a critical question: can accommodating these ambitions prevent, or even reverse, the turn toward geopolitically competitive grand strategies by Moscow and Beijing? In other words, might accommodation lead them to channel their efforts in more benign directions? The dominant framework for analyzing the ways in which states seek status-a framework rooted in the insights of Social Identity Theory (SIT)-suggests that the answer is yes: status-seekers will most likely turn toward geopolitically competitive strategies when they face apparently "impermeable" obstacles to their ambitions. I argue that this framework depends on a "mistranslation" of SIT. Properly translated, the theory tells us little about the consequences of persistent status denial for international politics. Instead, it implies that status-seeking will resolve into geopolitical competition when, first, participants view geopolitically significant resources as markers of status and, second, when leaders believe that they can successfully change the distribution of status. I use analyses of two prominent cases that should prove friendly ground for the conventional translation of SIT-Germany before World War I and Imperial Japan-to demonstrate the serious problems that plague the framework favored by international relations scholars, especially with respect to its central claim about the link between persistent status denial and geopolitical competition.

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Status and World Order

Cited by 135 publications

References 46 publications

Losing Face and Sinking Costs: Experimental Evidence on the Judgment of Political and Military Leaders

Losing Face and Sinking Costs: Experimental Evidence on the Judgment of Political and Military Leaders

On the Social Status of the European Union

Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics

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