In dyadic trade, the more dependent state is the more constrained one.

Evidence

Although the weakest-link approach has been extended to measurement of dyadic trade dependence by Oneal and Russett (1997, 1999), the research community has not yet formed a consensus on this procedure. The logic of their approach once again rests on the idea of constraints, albeit with a somewhat different reasoning than in the case of the dyadic democracy concept. They begin with an indicator of dependence consisting of one country’s total bilateral trade with another divided by its gross domestic product in order to control for the size of the economy. They then argue that for any pair of countries it is the more dependent one that is apt to be more constrained in its behavior to the other. Here constraints arise from self-interest in protecting a valuable trading relationship rather than from democratic norms or institutions. To construct a dyadic-level measure they once again rely on the weakest-link principle to model the constraints on the more dependent trading partner. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 949

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘dyadic trade dependence’ operationally: bilateral trade divided by GDP, with constraint flowing from the weaker (more dependent) partner.
• XREF: Connects to the weakest-link logic already developed for the dyadic democracy concept earlier in the book.