Policy Instruments and External Shocks: Explaining Differences in the Speed of U.S. Client State Acquisition

Abstract

Explaining why political events occur at different speeds is usually done by invoking tipping points or shocks. We argue that the latter, although a starting point, is inadequate and has to be supplemented, at least for activities involving multiple bureaucracies, by the policy instruments embedded in organizations and capable of being deployed in particular times and places. This is illustrated by a focus on U.S. foreign policy, the aim being to account for why the United States took much longer to acquire client states in Central America and the Caribbean in the first two decades of the twentieth century than it did to acquire South American and Canadian clients at the outbreak of World War II. The argument is that shocks can deploy certain policy instruments faster and on a more wholesale basis than others..