Introduction: Survey and Experimental Research in International Political Economy

Studies in international political economy (IPE) that use survey-response data sets and survey (or field) experiments have grown dramatically in recent years. New developments in survey and experimental methodology have arguably influenced IPE scholars not only to think more deeply about the microfoundations of the preferences, attitudes, and political behavior of key IPE actors but also to use survey or experimental methods to test causal claims and predictions. Yet the reasons for the rapid growth in survey and experimental methods in IPE are more multifaceted. We therefore seek to answer the following three pertinent questions in the introduction. First, what are the main substantive puzzles and issue-areas that IPE scholars analyze via survey and experimental methods in their research? Second, what are the main methodological advantages and drawbacks from using survey and experimental methods in IPE? Third, what are the key substantive theoretical and empirical insights that scholars have learned from recent research in IPE that employs either survey or experimental methods (or both)? In addition to answering these questions here, we also provide a summary of each article included in the special issue. The introduction concludes with a road map for future studies on survey and experimental research in IPE.     

Surveys,Experiments, and the Landscape of International Political Economy

The contributions to this issue show that surveys and experiments offer exciting new tools for doing empirical research in international political economy (IPE). This essay cautions that the utility of these tools is not self-evident: Neither appeals to microfoundations nor to methodological individualism in constructing explanations for social phenomena themselves recommend an embrace of surveys or experiments. The field of IPE should worry that the focus on surveys and experiments will constrain not just methodological choice but also theoretical breadth, limiting the field’s ability to conceive of what theories are admissible in learning about the global political economy.     

The Benefits of Experimental Methods for the Study of Campaign Effects

Researchers rely heavily on observational designs to study the effects of political campaigns. In doing so, scholars often overlook serious threats to causal inference that bedevil their research designs. The strategic nature of campaigns leads to serious selection biases in voter exposure to campaign stimuli and, ultimately, generates biased estimates of campaign effects. Standard approaches to establishing causal effects in observational research, such as the collection of panel data and the inclusion of covariates, are often inadequate. In contrast, experimental approaches offer researchers a more promising way to estimate accurately the causal effects of campaigns. In this essay, I discuss the recent renaissance of experimental research in the study of campaigns and illustrate how scholars can use lab, field, and survey experiments to good effect. When experimental methods are not feasible, studies of campaign effects would benefit from paying better attention to the causal identification strategy. In closing, I discuss how the logic of experimentation can be applied to some observational settings.     

Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations

A half-decade after the first systematic applications of prospect theory to international relations, scholars continue to debate its potential utility as a theoretical framework. Key questions include the validity of the experimental findings themselves, their relevance for real-world international behavior that involves high-stakes decisions by collective actors in interactive settings, and the conceptual status of prospect theory with respect to rational choice. In this essay I assess theoretical and methodological debates over these issues. I review work in social psychology and experimental economics and conclude that challenges to the external validity of prospect theory-based hypotheses for international behavior are much more serious than challenges to their internal validity. I emphasize the similarities between prospect theory and expected-utility theory, argue that hypotheses regarding loss aversion and the reflection effect are easily subsumed within the latter, and that evidence of framing effects and nonlinear responses to probabilities are more problematic for the theory. I conclude that priorities for future research include the construction of hypotheses on the framing of foreign policy decisions and research designs for testing them; the incorporation of framing, loss aversion, and the reflection effect into theories of collective and interactive decision making; and experimental research that is sensitive to the political and strategic context of foreign policy decision making.     

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are “pretreated.” This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of “pretreatment” from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.     

Looking Beyond the National Level: Foreign Direct Investment Attraction in U.S. States

International relations scholars need to look beyond the national level because U.S. states and governors are increasingly important actors in world politics. One way to look at their international activities is by examining the ways in which U.S. states seek to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), just one research puzzle at the nexus of international relations and U.S. state politics, two fields that rarely talk to one another. After pointing out the gaps within theories from international relations and international political economy, this paper describes the evolving global roles of both U.S. states and governors and shows how U.S. states attract FDI through the use of their international offices and governor-led overseas missions. Empirical findings indicate that U.S. states' international offices and a higher level of economic interdependence help states attract FDI, and the paper argues that extension of institutional approaches from IPE may be valuable for future research about the international capabilities of subnational governments and their leaders.     

How effective are preferential trade agreements? Ask the experts

Limited data on regional and preferential trade agreements prevent social scientists from testing some of the international cooperation literature??s most important claims. Expert surveys??a technique that is widely used in the field of comparative politics but thus far underutilized in international relations??allow us to capture many aspects of trade agreements for which data would otherwise be unavailable. They also provide us with a means of comparing agreements across regions and issue areas. We present a new dataset of expert opinion on the world??s regional trade organizations. Our survey covers 24 dimensions of 40 different regional agreements??including the perceived effectiveness of trade liberalization, the degree to which dispute settlement mechanisms are easy to use, and the political and international influence of the agreement. Bayesian factor analysis allows us to extract a principal dimension of effectiveness.     

Sporting Relations: Diplomacy,Small States,and Germany’s Post-war Return to International Sport

ABSTRACT

Germany’s post-war return to international sport was not uniform across all federations. The nature of each sport—summer versus winter, team versus individual—influenced the speed with which each international sport federation dealt with the issue of Germany’s return. Some federations allowed German participation even before they formally re-admitted the country to federation membership. However, sporting relations were not the only issue considered by international federations. The historical political relations between Germany and its smaller European neighbours were as important. The combination of the historical relationship amongst European states—especially memories of the Second World War—and internal sport federation dynamics affected state relations within the broader international system. The actions taken by the international sport federations provided examples—in areas that would not result in another world war or destroy Western alliances—of how Germany could return as a full member of the international community. The debates regarding Germany’s return across a number of international sport federations reveal the complex interaction among memory, politics, and practical matters.     

Political Trust,Corruption, and Ratings of the IMF and the World Bank

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. Public opinion data on attitudes to the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer survey, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology, and a range of sociodemographic factors including age, gender, employment status, health, education, and living conditions are not significantly related to ratings of effectiveness. Rather, we find that political trust and corruption—two very important concepts in the wider literature on individual-level attitudes toward international relations and foreign policy issues—are strongly associated with ratings of effectiveness.     

Deciding to Intervene: An Analysis of International and Domestic Influences on United States Interventions in Intrastate Disputes

Although the United States has been the most prolific intervener in the international system since the end of World War II, there has been little consensus among scholars regarding the motivations of U.S. interventions in domestic political disputes abroad. In addition, scholars do not agree on the relative effects of international factors and domestic factors on intervention decisions by the U.S. Previous research on the motivations of U.S. interventions has occurred within at least two distinctive “streams” of literature: (1) studies of state interventions; and (2) studies of the use of military force by the U.S. Hypotheses regarding U.S. interventions in intrastate disputes are derived from the previous literature, and the hypotheses are tested using recently-compiled data on intrastate disputes and U.S. interventions in intrastate disputes occurring between 1945 and 2002. The results suggest a combination of international factors, including geographic proximity and ideological linkage, significantly influence the decisions of the U.S. to intervene in intrastate disputes. The results also suggest international factors are generally more important than domestic factors, and the effects of both domestic factors and international factors on U.S. intervention decisions may differ depending on the specific type of intervention and the time period.     

The Social Basis of Voting Correctly

A large literature has established that people learn from political discussion, and some scholars suggest that people will make better choices if they engage in political discussion with opinion leaders. To establish that discussion promotes better vote choices, however, we have to create a measure of rational choice to test the impact of discussion. Recently, scholars have used Lau and Redlawsk's voting correctly measure to test the impact of various influences on the rationality of vote choice. Using this new measure of rationality—voting correctly—I determine whether political discussion has the predicted positive impact. To test this theory, I use 2000 American National Election Study survey data, and show that greater political discussion with knowledgeable discussants leads to more correct voting.     

The Global Expansion of Capital Logic

In analyzing international politics and economics, scholars have used a variety of paradigms. Economists, for example, look at globalization and its effects on consumers, developed and developing countries, and its effect on the political structure of various countries. In the realm of politics, some look to the role of the United Nations, others look to the role of the United States as the lone superpower.     

“But the UN Said So …”: International Organisations as Discursive Authorities

Many scholars take it as given that international governmental and non-governmental actors play a decisive role in international politics as regulative, moral or epistemic authorities. Hence, a denationalised “multi-centric world” (James Rosenau) is said to be emerging, although empirical evidence for this is incomplete at best. Building on a variety of communication theoretical approaches, I argue for a clear-cut differentiation between authority and the power of the better argument. Moreover, I claim that, by looking at the way actors select and refer to the statements of others (“authority talk”), we can research the reproduction of authority as a specific type of relational power exercised by a variety of political actors, including governments, international agencies and non-state actors. The usefulness of this kind of analytical framework for researching an emerging “world authority structure” (John Boli) is illustrated, using speeches and news pieces on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan/Darfur. Results suggest that the common perception of an existing “non-governmental order” in humanitarian politics is highly exaggerated. Instead, what we see is a high degree of “UN-isation” of debate and a pivotal role of national governments that are widely acknowledged as authoritative sources of meaning.     

Elite Polarization and Public Opinion: How Polarization Is Communicated and Its Effects

Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage of elite polarization. We show that such coverage is predominantly critical of polarization. Moreover, we show that unlike coverage of politics focused on individual politicians, coverage of elite polarization principally frames partisan divisions as rooted in the values of the parties rather than strategic concerns. We build on these novel findings with two survey experiments exploring the influence of these features of polarization news coverage on public attitudes. In our first study, we show that criticism of polarization leads partisans to more positively evaluate the argument offered by their non-preferred party, increases support for bi-partisanship, but ultimately does not change the extent to which partisans follow their party’s policy endorsements. In our second study, we show that Independents report significantly less political interest, trust, and efficacy when polarization is made salient and this is particularly evident when a cause of polarization is mentioned. These studies have important implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization—and how polarization is communicated—for public opinion and political behavior in democratic politics.     

"Who Are You Wearing?" Using the Red Carpet Question Pedagogically

This paper presents an active learning module design and implementation strategy for use in an undergraduate course on globalization, world politics, international political economy, or international relations. Students are first asked to conduct research on their wardrobe and its origins by country, allowing for classroom discussion of research methods and designs. Results are submitted, along with a short response essay. This is evaluated in conjunction with a case-study short reading and shared discussion, followed by a short video/multimedia presentation on free trade and labor issues. Drawing on literature on active learning, I argue that this presents a more cohesive approach for engaging students in the material on a substantive level, while at the same time allowing them to actively appreciate and understand such diverse concepts as commodity chains, free trade zones, fair trade versus free trade, gendered divisions of labor, consumer responsibility, research methodologies, and macroeconomic shifts in employment across nations. This also serves as a rubric for instructors to use in creating their own topical "modules." Preliminary data and classroom results are discussed, as are additional strategies for lesson development.     

Flip-flop rebel,dollar soldier: demobilisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo1

The wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have seen the recruitment of flip-flop clad rebels and instability arising because soldiers have not received their salary of a few dollars. Conversely, demobilisation programmes, which bring promises of reintegration grants, have not attracted people to disarm. This paper examines this conundrum alongside three features of the situation in Congo: the informalisation of politics and the economy, the exercise of power through violence, and the multiple crises in which people are living. Drawing on reports on demobilisation and interviews conducted in Congo, the paper investigates what implications these three aspects have for demobilisation, and what is achieved by the programmes as they stand. It argues that demobilisation programmes do not address fighters' motivations, and outcomes are largely immaterial. Instead there is a political pillage—akin to the pillages that took place across Congo in the early 1990s—by which some parties make immediate gains, whilst shaping the conditions for longer term losses and destructive systems.     

The Futility of Buffer Zones in International Politics

Buffer zones as a concept have a long history. Despite their frequent occurrence in international relations past and present, however, they have been treated in passing by scholars and policymakers alike, and then usually from a purely historical perspective. Their importance in conflict management, third-party intervention and power politics are not adequately mirrored in scholarly research. This article seeks to remedy this lapse by re-introducing the buffer zone as a tool of international conflict management in a new and systematic fashion. In this article, we survey buffer zones, their conceptual roots and characteristics, and illustrate our theoretical findings with an array of different examples—predominantly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, we make three fundamental arguments about buffer zones.     

《大国政治的悲剧》霸权逻辑的脆弱性——评约翰·米尔斯海默的“中国威胁论”

由于美国学者约翰·米尔斯海默的《大国政治的悲剧》这本书刚出版不久 ,所以目前国内对约翰·米尔斯海默的国际政治理论进行研究的并不多 ,从逻辑结构的角度进行研究的更为鲜见。作者与约翰·米尔斯海默教授的辩论内容主要包括 5个部分 :逻辑起点 :进攻性现实主义辨析 ;逻辑支点 :民主和平论辨析 ;逻辑基点 :人口和财富辨析 ;逻辑推论 :“一个国家要想生存下去就必然成为霸权国家”辨析 ;结论     

Invisible Borders: Economic Liberalization and National Identity

Various developments in the post–WWII global economy have led many scholars of international relations to contend that borders are eroding. My argument takes issue with this, suggesting that borders are not becoming increasingly meaningless; instead, some states are working to endow them with meaning in innovative ways. Specifically, I examine the trade disputes over culture industries during recent GATT and NAFTA talks to demonstrate that some states are shifting their attention from territorial borders to conceptual or invisible borders. Many governments support the removal of borders that serve as barriers to the movement of goods, services, capital, information, and, in some cases, people. Nevertheless, these same governments resist the increasing permeability of borders that provide the boundaries of political community.     

Scales of Political Action in the Anthropocene: Gaia,Networks, and Cities as Frontiers of Doing Earthly Politics

The purpose of this article is to propose a new theorisation of “scale” in doing earthly politics (i.e. who is acting, who should be responsible for addressing planetary environmental degradation). I connect the politics of scale in global urban politics with the scale question in environmental politics. While the existing paradigm on “politics of scale” have made an excellent contribution on performative aspects of scale, they have failed to respond to the affirmative movements in which scholars and policy makers attempt to theorise scales as ranges in which political action can be mobilised. On the other hand, the new “down-to-earth” affirmative ecopolitics movement often fails to move beyond the romanticisation of the local, which is easily subject to criticisms, such as “local trap” where the small is not always intrinsically “good”. As an alternative, I theorise “scales of political action” that can be simultaneously both materially situated (local) and ubiquitous (global), mainly using Gaian ecology and complex theory. Finally, as a concrete example of “scales of political action”, I propose cities as frontiers of doing earthly politics, focusing on the characteristics of urban conditions that match our new theorisation of scale.