Abstract

Abstract Status-seeking behavior, the pursuit of a higher position on an international social hierarchy as perceived and defined by members of a community, has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, much of what this recent literature calls status-seeking is difficult to distinguish from something else: the pursuit of fairness. We disentangle status-seeking from fairness-seeking by identifying where a pure status-seeking and a fairness-seeking argument diverge—in the degree to which state actors demand exclusive rights and privileges. Survey experiments of the Russian public concerning the country's membership in the G8 as well as a case study of Germany's behavior in the first Moroccan crisis provide strong support for our “biased fairness” account. Derived from the behavioral economics and psychology literature, it maintains that leaders demand entitlements that match their status and find any such denial as less fair than an equivalent discrepancy for other countries. However, once assured of what they deserve, they do not demonstrate any tendency to exclude others, the hallmark of the status motivation. Convergent evidence at multiple levels of analysis, country contexts, and widely different time periods gives strong indications that fairness concerns are driving much of what is attributed to status-seeking.

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