United we stand, divided they fall: Use of coercion and rewards as alliance balancing strategy

Why does a state use coercion, as opposed to rewards, to divide its adversaries or to maintain unity among its allies? Use of coercion as a means of achieving these goals is puzzling because it can be self-defeating. Because use of coercion tends to generate a target state's negative reactions, it often results in strengthening the very alliance that an initiator of coercion is trying to divide or likely to further weaken its ally's commitments. Although the conventional wisdom attributes such a counterproductive use of coercion to regime type and poor leadership, these factors do not provide satisfactory answers to the question because individual leaders or regimes often use both rewards and coercion in different situations.; Using insights from social exchange theories, I propose a theory that explains under what conditions a state uses rewards or coercion in alliance balancing behavior. In so doing, I put forward two counterintuitive arguments. First, a state uses coercion in alliance politics not because it has more coercive capabilities than a target, but because its an ability to reward a target state is weaker than that of a competitor who is attempting to influence the same target. In other words, it is relative reward power that influences a state's decision to use coercion or rewards in alliance balancing behavior. Second, a state's security dependence upon a target state creates incentives for the state to use coercion against the target. This is because the initiator has so much to lose in the dependent relationship that it becomes willing to use coercion to affect the relation to its own favor.; I test the above stated arguments by analyzing cases obtained from alliance politics in northeast Asia after the Second World War. The test results generally support these arguments. In conclusion, I derive from this research several theoretical implications for the issues such as reward power and alliance, dependence and bargaining power and sources of rogue state behavior.