Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations, APSA 2004
19
Identifying and, even more so, measuring patterns of authority is extremely
difficult.
10
The core problem is that legitimacy, central to the difference between
authority and other forms of power, is inherently unobservable. In domestic political
systems, long regarded as realms of hierarchy, variations in authority are seldom
measured systematically. Although scholars may use ordinal indicators of democracy, the
rule of law, and other institutional characteristics, even these do not capture well
variations in the extent of state authority and, especially, legitimacy. Such measures not
only emphasize formal-legal structures at the expense of relational authority, but they
focus more on the centralization of decision-making power within the government rather
than state authority per se.
11
In international relations, where hierarchy has long been
neglected, problems of identifying and measuring authority loom particularly large.
Security hierarchy can be captured indirectly by two sets of observable indicators.
These indicators are not themselves attributes or dimensions of authority, of course, but
they are manifestations of and likely vary with the underlying but unobservable construct.
First, hierarchy is suggested by the presence of military bases and forces from the
dominant state, A, in the territory of the subordinate state, B.
12
Military bases and troops
enable A to exercise considerable influence over the security policies of B. A can embroil
B in foreign conflicts if it chooses; by launching attacks from B’s territory, for instance,
A automatically implicates B in the conflict and makes it a target for retaliation by A’s
10
I am enormously indebted to Kathleen Hancock for suggestive operationalizations of security and
economic hierarchy. For her innovative study of hierarchy between the states of the former Soviet Union,
see Hancock (2001).
11
For a promising if now neglected attempt to describe domestic political systems in terms of authority
relations, see Katzenstein 1978.
12
The primary exception is troops or bases deployed under a multinational command, in which
multilateralism is itself a check on the authority of the dominant state, or as peace-keepers, which is a
special category designed to exercise authority not over B’s security policy but over its domestic political
system.
Convention