COMPARATIVE POLITICS I SURVEY

BRYN MCCARTHY

1. Fearon, James D. 1995. “Rationalist explanations for war.” International

Organization 49(3):379-379.
1.1. Research Question. What prevents states from locating a bargain both sides would
prefer to a fight?

1.2. Argument. First, Fearon outlines the traditional rationalist explanations for going
to war: (1) anarchy, (2) expected benefits greater than costs, (3) rational preventative war,
(4) rational miscalculation due to lack of information, and (5) rational miscalculation due
to disagreements about relative power. He says that those are null and instead proposes
two main other reasons: (1) privation information about relative capabilities and the in-
centive to misrepresent that information, or (2) commitment problems in which a solution
is unreasonable because one or more states would have an incentive to renege. He says
that anarchy doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t address the question of how the lack
of central authority prevents states from negotiating agreements both sides would prefer
to fighting. Preventative war arguments don’t consider whether the two states could con-
struct a bargain. Positive expected utility arguments don’t address the question of “how
or under what conditions it can be possible for two states both to prefer the costly gamble
of war” (387). He starts a basic game theoretic model assuming that there is some point
of agreement that can be researched. The assumptions are that there’s a probability that
one state would win, that states are risk-averse, and that a range of peaceful settlements
exists. Fearon says that disagreements about relative power occur because of this lack of
information. Wars also start because of miscalculations about the other states’ willingness
to fight, again due to lack of information. States sometimes have a reason to misrepresent
in bargaining because they want to avoid appearing as the aggressor, avoid appearing vul-
nerable, or deter future challenges. States may also use war as a way to reveal the others’
private information. War is the consequence of commitment problems because sometimes
states have incentives to renege, such as if the war is less costly for an aggressor. That is
why preemptive wars begin. “Essentially two mechanisms, or causal logics, explain why
rationally led states are sometimes unable to locate or agree on such a bargain: (1) the
combination of privation information about resolve or capability and incentives to mis-
represent these, and (2) states’ inability, in specific circumstances, to commit to uphold a
deal.”
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2. Arrow, Kenneth J. 1994. “Methodological Individualism and Social

Knowledge.” American Economic Review 84(2):1-9.
2.1. Research Question. What is the role of social values in economic theory?
2.2. Argument. Arrow argues that individualistic elements are the key to understand
economics. ”I want to argue today that a close examination of even the most standard
economic analysis shows that social categories are in fact used in economic analysis all the
time and that they appear to be absolute necessities of the analysis, not just figures of
speech that can be eliminated if need be.” Arrow wants to make the case for ”method-
ological individualism,” or the recognition that individuals shape economic analyses. ”The
starting point of the individualist paradigm is the simple fact that all social interactions
are after all interactions among individuals.” For example, when economists talk about
the ”market”, all transactions are conducted through the preferences and behaviors of
individuals. In game theory, he says, it must be recognized that all outcomes are as a
result of individual actions. ”What this example shows is that the rules of the game are
social...More generally, individual behavior is always mediated by social relations.” Indi-
vidual behavior is also shaped by the acquisition of knowledge, the role of which Arrow
says has been understated. ”Information may be supplied socially, but to be used, it has
to be absorbed individually.”

3. Kathlen Thelen and Wolfang Streek. 2005. Beyond Continuity:

Institutional Change in Advance Political Economies (Oxford UP), chapter
1.
3.1. Research Question. How does large-scale change happen gradually? How have
gradual changes facilitated the shift towards liberalism in contemporary politics?
3.2. Argument. This section is largely the setup for the entire book in terms of theory.
Thelen and Streek begin by arguing that since the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a shift in
post-war economies towards liberalism, with a broadening role of markets. ”Liberalization,
then, may be described both as an inevitable economic adjustment in organized political
economies to growing internal and external market pressures, and as a political strategy
of either governments overwhelmed by unsatisfiable political demands or of business extri-
cating itself through internationalization from the profit squeeze imposed on it by labor at
the high of its power war power int he early 1970s.” This has come as a result of gradual
change, which is often overlooked by contemporary scholarship. ”Rather than big changes
in response to big shocks, we will be looking for incremental change with transformative
results.”
The authors proceed to define institutions as ”building blocks of social order: they
represent socially sanctioned, that is, collectively enforced expectations with respect to
the behavior of specific categories of actors or to the performance of certain activities.”
”The way we include obligation and enforcement into our concept of institution, we can
explicitly provide for a significant amount of ”play” int eh rules actors are expected to
follow, and thurs of the possibility that institution change may be generated as a result of
 COMPARATIVE POLITICS I SURVEY 3

the normal, every implementation and enactment of an institution.” To them, institutions

are regimes. They say that there is always a gap between the ideal version of a rule and its
implementation, leading to four assumptions: (1) the meaning of a rule is always subject
to interpretation, (2) the honest application of a rule can still have unanticipated results,
(3) rule-takers attempt to revise the rules during implementation, and (4) there are limits
to the extent to which institutions can prevent violations of rules. ”A grounded, realistic
concept of social institutions...emphasize their being continuously created and recreated by
a great number of actors with divergent interest, varying normative commitments, di↵erent
powers, and limited cognition.”
Institutions change gradually through displacement, layering, drift, conversion, and ex-
haustion. (1) Displacement: ”Institutional configurations are vulnerable to change through
displacement as traditional arrangements are discredited or pushed to the side in factor
of new institutions and associated behavioral logics.” (2) Layering: ”Layering involves ac-
tive sponsorship of amendments, additions, or revisions to an existing set of institutions.”
(3). Drift: ”Drift occurs without explicit political maneuvering: the world surrounding an
institution evolves in ways that alter its scope, meaning, and function.” (4) Conversion:
”Institutions are not so much amended or allowed to decay as they are redirected to new
goals, functions, or purposes.” (5). Exhaustion: Institutional breakdown because of age or
other factors.
All of these factors relate to the way that liberalism has occurred. ”Liberalization, but
comparison, can often proceed without political mobilization, simply by encoring or tol-
erating self-interested subversion of collective institutions from below, or by unleashing
individual interests and the subversive intelligence of self-interested actors bent on maxi-
mizing their utilities.”

4. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1986. “Rational Choice and the
Framing of Decisions.” Journal of Business 59(4):S251-S278
4.1. Research Question. Do the assumptions of rational choice hold?
4.2. Argument. ”The logic of choice [rational choice theory] does not provide an adequate
foundation for a descriptive theory of decision making.” The authors highlight four key
assumptions of rational choice: Cancellation, Transitivity, Dominance, and Invariance. (1)
Cancellation is the ”elimination of any state of the world that yields the same outcome
regardless of one’s choice.” Transitivity is the prospect that one’s preference is always
the one with the highest utility and is not in relation to the presence of other outcomes.
Dominance is the theory that ”if one option is better than another in one state and at
least as good in all other states, the dominant option should be chosen.” Invariance is the
condition that ”di↵erent representations of the same choice problem should yield the same
preference.” The authors specifically want to take down the assumptions of dominance and
invariance.
The authors demonstrate many ways that the condition of invariance can be violated,
primarily through framing. ”Choices involving gains are usually risk averse, and choices
involving losses are often risk seeking.” Dominance is also violated along the way. When
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outcomes are framed as gains or losses, people respond di↵erently. For example, individuals
are more likely to forego a discount than accept a surcharge, like in the framing of credit
v. Cash use as a ”cash discount” instead of a ”credit surcharge”. Economists deal with
potential violations by arguing that violations are ”(1) restricted to insignificant choice
problems, (2) quickly eliminated by learning, or (3) irrelevant to economics because of
the corrective functions of market forces.” However, individuals make poor choices even in
high-risk scenarios, learning only takes place under certain conditions, and the claim that
markets correct mistakes is not supported by evidence.

5. Wedeen, Lisa. 2002. “Conceptualizing culture: Possibilities for political

science.” American Political Science Review 96(4):713-728.
5.1. Research Question. How should we think about the concept of ”political culture”?
5.2. Argument. Wedeen argues for a reconceptualization of culture as ”semiotic prac-
tices” in which symbols are mutually created and interpreted (culture is a meaning-making
process). In the past, scholars have defined culture as ”a deeply sedimented essence at-
taching to, or inhering in particular groups,” such as in the world of Samuel Huntington.
However, this ignores the historical conditions and relationships that go into the creation
of political phenomena. ”The treatment of culture in political science has downplayed the
heterogeneous ways in which people experience the social order within and among groups,
while exaggerating the commonality, constancy, and permanence of intragroup beliefs and
values. As a result, cultural essentialist explanations of political outcomes such as ethnic
or religious violence tend to naturalize categories of groupies, rather than exposing the
conditions under which such experiences of goriness come to seem natural when they do.”
In order to actually understand the meaning-making process, scholars must ”ask ques-
tions about the conditions under which specific material and semiotic activities emerge,
the contexts within which they find public expression, the work they do in the world,
and the irregularities they generate in the process of reproduction.” Wedeen prescribes a
number of ethnographic and text-based ways by which scholars can do this. She gives an
example of when this could be useful in the field, such as in the recent work in ”ethnic
identity-formation and ethnic violence”. She argues that ethnicity should not be taken
for granted, but that scholars should understand it as constructed. They could do this by
constructing a database in which degrees of ethnicity are noted” ”Investigating semiotic
practices can also help scholars to establish important criteria for di↵erentiating passionate
forms of solidarity from value, mildly constraining experiences of ’affinity and affiliation’.”
”A semiotic practices approach avoids the ahistorical, empirically untenable formulation
of culture currently invoked by political culture and some rational choice theorists. And it
gives us explanatory purchase on key dependent variables, such as compliance and ethnic
identity-formation.”