Political Compliance and U.S. Trade Dominance

This study examines influence relations between the United States and countries that are dependent upon their foreign trade with it. The hypotheses are concerned with political compliance expected of these dependencies as a consequence of their economic vulnerabilities to pressure from the U.S. Informed by trade-related variables and U.N. General Assembly voting behavior of the mid-1960s, the hypotheses find some support. The evidence shows that its dependencies, especially those in the western hemisphere, agree with the U.S. in General Assembly roll calls to a greater degree than do other countries. This compliant behavior, however, is confined to votes that pit the United States against the Soviet Union; when the superpowers are in partial or complete agreement, U.S. dependencies are no more in accord with the U.S. than are other countries. Throughout the study, dependencies are proposed to be vulnerable along four dimensions of their economic circumstances. Interestingly, the respective effects of these four factors are not as hypothesized. Their relative weights in contributing to compliance are largely as expected, but the nature of their partial associations is not. Finally, it happens that most of the dependencies turn out to be Latin American and Caribbean countries, a fact that complicates the interpretation of the statistical results.