Abstract
Dependency theory has cast new light on the workings of the international political economy, and on the relations between more and less developed countries. Insofar as dependency theory aims at specifying generalsystemic constraints on the behavior of Third World states, its ability to explain/predict how particular Third World states respond to these constraints is limited.
Our concern is with the foreign policy responses of the LDCs. The comparative foreign policy approach to this question has attempted to account for cross-national variation in foreign policy responses of LDCs with variation in theirdomestic features, i.e., attributes, capabilities, and regime types. Here we suggest that an understanding of the foreign policies of the LDCs can be enhanced by adding an explicitly dyadic perspective to dependency and comparative foreign policy approaches, conceptualized as a form of patron-cliency.
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Carney, C.P. International patron-client relationships: A conceptual framework. Studies in Comparative International Development 24, 42–55 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687171
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687171