Jumping on the Bandwagon: An Interest-Based Explanation for Great Power Alliances

Abstract

Despite an impressive collection of classical works on the subject, little is known about the frequency or characteristics of Great Power alliance decisions to balance with the weak or bandwagon with the strong. Most works hold that balancing is the predominant Great Power alliance formation behavior, but many examples to the contrary come to mind. We clearly operationalize the concepts of balancing and bandwagoning and find that Great Powers ally with the stronger of two choices (i.e., bandwagon) more often than balance of power theory expects. We argue this surprising finding occurs because Great Powers ally based on interests, not power. We test the generalizability of our argument with a censored probit model of Great Power alliance formation on all Great Powers from 1816 to 1992.

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