After Exit: Leadership Transition and Institutional Resilience After Hegemonic Withdrawal

When hegemonic powers terminate their support for international institutions in whose creation they have been instrumental, they confront them with severe challenge. Faced with hegemonic withdrawal, some international institutions decay while others are resilient. To explain the varying development of international institutions abandoned by hegemonic powers, this paper develops a Leadership Transition Theory (LTT) and suggests that alternative leaders are key in overcoming the challenges ensuing hegemonic withdrawal. According to the LTT, two types of actors are promising candidates for taking the lead after hegemonic withdrawal and contributing to institutional resilience: established powers and autonomous IOs bureaucracies. To assess whether alternative leaders indeed matter for institutional resilience after hegemonic withdrawal, I focus on instances of US withdrawal from international organizations and agreements in the period 1945-2020. A regression analysis drawing on the original ExitUS Dataset comprising more than 100 instances of US withdrawal from international institutions lends support to the theoretical expectations. The results underline the importance of leadership for the resilience of international institutions in times of geopolitical turbulences.