(CHP 2) Understanding Interests, Interactions, and Institutions

Interests: What Do Actors Want from Politics?

  • Interests: What actors want to achieve through political action; preferences of actors over the possible outcomes that might result from their political choices

    • Grouping of interests

      • Power or Security

        • Must fire be safe from threats as a prerequisite to all other goals

      • Economic or Material Welfare

        • Political actors are presumed to want higher standards of living

      • Ideological Goals

        • What political actors want or believe to be good and desirable

Actors and Interests

  • Actors: The basic unit for the analysis of international politics; can be either individuals or groups of people with common interests

    • State Interests = Security, power, territory, wealth, ideology

    • Politicians = Reelection/retention of office, ideology, policy goals

    • Firms, industries, or business associations = Wealth, profit

    • Classes or factors of production = Material well-being, wealth

    • Bureaucracies = Budget maximization, influence, policy preferences; often summarized by the adage of “where you stand depends on where you sit”

    • International Orgs = As composites of states, they reflect the interests of member states according to their voting power. As organizations, they are assumed to be similar to domestic bureaucracies

    • Nongovernmental organizations, often transnational or international in scope and membership: Moral, ideological, or poligy goals; human rights; the environment; religion

  • State: A central authority that has the ability to make and enforce laws, rules, and decisions within a specified territory

  • Sovereignty: The expectation that states have legal and political supremacy within their territorial boundaries

  • Anarchy: The absence of a central authority with the ability to make and enforce laws that bind all actors

  • National Interests: Interests that belong to the state itself

Interactions: Why Can’t Actors Always Get What They Want?

  • Interactions: The ways in which the choices of two or more actors combine to produce political outcomes

Cooperation and Bargaining

  • Cooperation: When two or more actors adopt policies that make at least one actor better off without making any other actor worse off

Maximum Feasible Benefit is called the Pareto Frontier

  • Any policy combination that leads to an outcome in the shaded area qba would make both actors better off than they are under the status quo

  • Any policy combination on the Pareto frontier between b and a makes the actors as well off as possible

  • Bargaining: An interaction in which two or more actors must decide how to distribute something of value. In bargaining, increasing one actor’s share of the good decreases the share available to others.

  • When actors bargain, they move along the Pareto frontier, as represented by the green arrow

  • On the frontier line, any improvement in A’s welfare comes strictly at the expense of B’s welfare

When Can Actors Cooperate?

  • Coordination: A type of cooperative interaction in which actors benefit from all making the same choices and subsequently have no incentive not to comply

  • Collaboration: A type of cooperative interaction in which actors gain from working together but nonetheless have incentives not to comply with any agreement

    • Ex: Prisoner’s Dilemma

  • Public Goods: Products that are non-excludable and non-rival in consumption, such as national defense or clean air or water

  • Collective Action Problems: Obstacles to cooperation that occur when actors have incentives to collaborate but each acts with the expectation that others will pay the costs of cooperation

  • Free Ride: To fail to contribute to a public good while benefiting from the contributions of others

Numbers and Relative Sizes of Actors

  • Smaller the number of actors = more likely to cooperate

Iteration, Linkage, and Strategies of Reciprocal Punishment

  • Iteration: Repeated interactions with the same partners

    • The more likely you are to interact with someone else again the more likely you are to want to cooperate

      • Ex: You might tip more at a restaurant you expect to visit again, compared to a restaurant you don’t expect to go ever again

  • Linkage: The linking of cooperation on one issue to interactions on a second issue

    • Enables victims to retaliate by withholding cooperation on other issues

  • Information

    • When actors lack information about the actions taken by another party, cooperation may fail because of uncertainity and misperception

Who Wins and Who Loses in Bargaining?

  • Cooperation = Potential to make actors collectively better off

  • Bargaining = Winners or Losers

  • Power: The ability of Actor A to get Actor B to do something that B would otherwise not do; ability to get the other side to make concessions and to avoid having to make concessions oneself

  • The outcome that occurs when no bargain is achieved is often called the reversion outcome

    • Actor more satisfied with reversion outcome = Less incentive to make concessions in order to reach bargain

    • Actor less satisfied with reversion outcome = Desperate to reach agreement and offers bigger concessions to make the satisfied actor agree

      • To shift the reversion outcome in their favor, actors have three basic ways of exercising power:

        • Coercion

        • Outside options

        • Agenda setting

Coercion

  • Coercion: A strategy of imposing or threatening to impose costs on other actors in order to induce a change in their behavior

    • Factors = Military force & economic sanctions

Outside Options

  • Outside Options: The alternatives to bargaining with a specific actor

    • Both sides may have outside options, but the side with the more attractive outside option has larger bargaining power to threaten to walk away

      • An outside option would be US imposing sanctions on an item China uses, but China just deciding to buy said item from Brazil instead

Agenda Setting

  • Agenda Setting: Actions taken before or during bargaining that make the reversion outcome more favorable for one party

Institutions: Do Rules Matter in World Politics?

  • Institutions: Sets of rules, known and shared by the relevant community, that structure interactions in specific ways

    • Generally serve to facilitate cooperation among their members

How Do Institutions Affect Cooperation?

  • There is no central authority at the global level (anarchy)

  • International institutions do not generally enforce cooperation among their members

  • Affect cooperation through:

    • Setting standards of behavior

    • Verifying compliance

    • Reducing the costs of joint decision making

    • Resolving disputes

Setting Standards of Behavior

  • Clear standards of behavior enable others to determine whether an actor is violating an agreement

Verifying Compliance

  • Outside inspectors coming into countries to verify compliance

Reducing the Costs of Joint Decision Making

  • Societies create political institutions—rules of the political game—that define how joint political decisions will be made (otherwise the cost to consider all potential decisions would be too big)

Resolving Disputes

  • Ruling on whether a given action is allowed or not according to the standards of the institutions

  • Resolve ambiguities in agreements

  • Increase the expectation that violations will be called out

  • Bestow legitimacy on efforts to sanction violators

Whom Do Institutions Benefit?

  • All institutions reflect particular policy biases

Why Follow the Rules?

  • Agree to comply with rules for the broader cooperation they facilitate

  • Actors comply with institutions because they are already in place and often cheaper than creating their own institution that sides ideologically with them

Lecture Notes

  • What is social science?

    • Finding and understanding systemic patterns and relationships in the social world

    • So, political science is interested in discovering these patterns in the political world (a subset of the social world)

    • International relations is interested in the discovery of systematic patterns of politics across state borders

    • It is not interested in idiosyncratic, random events, but rather in the systemic, predictable ways in which different factors influence each other

  • Social Science Research

    • Asks a question about patterns in the social (political) world

    • Proposes a potential answer to that question

    • Uses data to test the likelihood that this answer is true

    • Explains why this pattern (or lack thereof) is important

  • Types of Questions

    • Normative: What should be done about an issue?

      • Editorials in newspapers

    • Hypothetical: What would happen if something else happens?

      • Political forecasting, briefings

    • Factual/procedural: Facts about the world

      • These have objectively right and wrong answers that are readily available, even if people choose not to believe them

      • Some political science papers fit under this category. We call this descriptive research.

    • Empirical: How does this attribute of the world work?

      • This is (mainly) where social science research lives

  • All the types of questions are connected

    • To do research, you first need to draw on some basic facts, so factual/procedural questions can help form the basis for identifying your broader empirical questions

      • What is the ratio of female to male leaders in the world?

    • This may lead you to make an empirical question

      • What are the effects of increasing the share of female leaders on the likelihood of war?

    • The answers to your empirical questions can then help inform hypothetical questions you have about the future or alternative states of the world

      • What would happen if the United States had a female president?

    • The answers to your empirical questions may also have normative implications that can be discussed as implications of your research

      • Increasing female representation in politics could decrease the frequency of deadly wars

  • Normative vs. Positivist Questions

    • Normative question:

      • Make some type of explicit or implicit value judgment (SHOULD)

      • “How can we solve the problem of pollution today?'“

    • Positivist question:

      • Seeks to uncover objective truths about causes and effects (IS)

      • “What are the effects of carbon emissions on global temperatures?”

      • You don’t care if the answer is not what you expected or wanted

  • What is a theory?

    • What is the relationship between two (or more) factors, why it exists, and when it holds true

Realism

  • Key Concepts:

    • Anarchy: No hierarchically superior, coercive authority that can create laws, resolve disputes, or enforce law and order

    • Creates insecurity and uncertainty over security

    • Power is always relative

  • Key implication of realism: the security dilemma

    • The only way to improve security is by balancing

    • How do states balance?

      • Build up arms (internal balancing)

      • Build up alliances (external balancing)

NEOREALISM: Not just power, But structure

  • Power still matters, but the most important thing is how it is distributed across the international system

    • Unipolarity

    • Bipolarity

    • Multipolarity

  • Neorealists: Bipolar is most stable

Liberalism

  • Key Ideas:

    • Institutional reform or collective action can moderate or even eliminate war, violence, injustice

    • Builds on earlier idealist school of thought

    • Collective security can be obtained through cooperation among nations

    • People are fundamentally good

Neo-Liberal Institutionalism

  • If realists are right and anarchy leads to conflict, why do we see so much cooperation?

    • Neo-Lib Inst. answer: Collective interdependence

  • States have various formal and informal interactions

  • States do not only care about security, but also share common interests

  • Absolute gains matter, not just relative ones

Domestic Sources of Liberalism

  • State is not a “unitary actor”

  • The structure of a state’s domestic political and economic system influences how it behaves internationally

  • Most influential here is the Democratic Peace Theory

Constructivism

  • Key Concepts:

    • “Fuzzier” ideas like norms and identities matter a lot

    • These ideas are socially constructed and thus malleable

  • E.G. What doe sovereignty mean?

    • It means what people decide it means

    • Fire in a theatre analogy

Marxism

  • Key Concepts:

    • Bourgeoise and Proletariat

    • Capital and Labor

    • Means of production

    • Roots of Imperialism:

      • Overproduction of goods/services

      • Underconsumption by workers

      • Oversaving by upper class

      • Corporations need to sell goods

        • So they expand abroad to find new markets

      • Dependency Theory

Lecture Summary

  • Realist → Balance of Power/Anarchy

  • Liberals → Domestic institutions

  • Constructivists → Socially constructed ideas

  • Marxists → Capitalism/means of production

  • Feminists → Gender

  • Critical theorists → Historical power structures