Bandwagoning

Bandwagoning in International Relations refers to the connection of one or more state / states, to a state that has a higher power potential. It can thus be understood as a kind of fellow - effect in international relations. Examples can be found mainly in the period of the Cold War, in which both American and Soviet side took place a block formation and in which aligned themselves with smaller states in self-defense one of the two larger states.

The term bandwagoning was used for the first time by Quincy Wright in his book, A study of War ( 1942) and introduced by the American political scientist Kenneth Waltz, a representative of neo-realism, in his Theory of International Politics ( 1979) as a general scientific term.