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Abstract
Why and how do powerful states institutionalize their military alliance treaties with much weaker partners? I argue the dominant approach to alliance treaty designmutual capability aggregationis ultimately too narrow to capture the unique dynamics of asymmetric alliance partnerships where one partner is much more powerful than the other. Instead, I introduce a complementary exchange model of asymmetric alliance institutionalization that allows for major and minor power partners to have different motives in the cost-benefit analysis of whether to institutionalize an alliance treaty, such that the major power gains greater foreign policy projection while the minor power gains new security guarantees. This approach, I argue, explains why we should expect to observe more frequent and deeper alliance treaty institutionalization in asymmetric alliances than symmetric partnerships. Using the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset, as well as a new index measure of institutional depth, I evaluate these and other empirical hypotheses derived from this theory in bilateral alliance treaties from 1815 to 2003. The results of my models conform to the expectations of the complementary exchange model. I also apply this approach to a qualitative analysis using four illustrative cases of major power alliance partnersGreat Britain, France, the United States, and Russia/USSR. This project moves the alliance design literature forward by illustrating that the concepts of rational design, institutionalism, and relative power together explain the politics of how major powers and minor powers cooperate through the formation of military alliance treaties.