The compliance model of dependent foreign policy argues that dependent states will implement the foreign policy preferences of their dominant economic partners. Despite its failure to deliver strong empirical results, compliance remains dominant within the study of dependent foreign policy. This article examines compliance's problems and explains its endurance within the subfield of international relations. Six cases drawn from the Hurtado and Febres Cordero administrations in Ecuador during the 1980s are analyzed to evaluate compliance's three critical assumptions about the dependent foreign policy process: the unitary actor, core-periphery bargaining, and divergent preferences between core and periphery. In only one of the cases do compliance's assumptions hold true and does compliance account for Ecuador's foreign policy. Flaws in the bargaining assumption and the divergent preferences assumption account for the model's poor description of the process behind many dependent states' foreign policies.
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