Institutional Influence

institutional-influence measures structural power exercised through the global financial institutions — the power to block reform and to direct the institution as one's agent. The structural question is: who controls what the IMF/World Bank can and cannot do? — not who holds the most votes. Sub-threshold voting weight is relational bargaining inside someone else's framework; the structural levers are the veto and the use of the institution as instrument.

Strange treats the financial institutions as instruments through which a dominant state's structural power operates, and warns explicitly against confusing the institution's authority with the member's:

• "Here is the leading country of the world market economy, without whose say-so no reform or change has ever been made since 1943" (Strange 1994, p.115, on the US) — the veto/blocking lever.
• "the International Monetary Fund was at hand, ready and willing to act as schoolmaster and government inspector, looking for Letters of Intent promising changes in economic policy of a generally deflationary, disciplinary, pro-market and anti-subsidy nature" (Strange 1994, p.112) — the institution-as-agent lever; the Fund disciplines on the dominant state's behalf.
• the warning: "It is only too easy, misled by the public relations efforts of international organizations, to confuse… the authority of NATO with that of the United States, or that of COMECON with that of the Soviet Union" (Strange 1994, p.233).
• Krasner, endorsed: "regimes were an intervening variable between structural power and outcomes" (Strange 1994, p.21) — institutions transmit structural power, they are not its source.

A flat voting-share number credits a mid-size vote as structurally equivalent in kind to a blocking stake — conflating relational influence with structural control.