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Constructivism sees the world, and what we can know about the world, as socially constructed. This view refers to the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge that are also called ontology and epistemology in research language. Alexander Wendt (1995) offers an excellent example that illustrates the social construction of reality when he explains that 500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons. These identifications are not caused by the nuclear weapons (the material structure) but rather by the meaning given to the material structure (the ideational structure). It is important to understand that the social relationship between the United States and Britain and the United States and North Korea is perceived in a similar way by these states, as this shared understanding (or intersubjectivity) forms the basis of their interactions. The example also shows that nuclear weapons by themselves do not have any meaning unless we understand the social context. It further demonstrates that constructivists go beyond the material reality by including the effect of ideas and beliefs on world politics. This also entails that reality is always under construction, which opens the prospect for change. In other words, meanings are not fixed but can change over time depending on the ideas and beliefs that actors hold.
An emergent paradigm, referred to as Open Economy Politics (OEP), now structures and guides research among many scholars. This essay sketches the general contours of the paradigm. Scientific accumulation is, in my view, the potential and great benefit of a self-conscious understanding of OEP as a single, unifying paradigm. The essay also provides a sympathetic critique of OEP and shows how the paradigm can be extended to capture some of the concerns and insights of other critics. Most important, this critique highlights the role and consequences of certain simplifying assumptions commonly used in OEP and calls for a closer examination of how international institutions and policies structure and change the interests of actors within countries that are now taken as exogenous.
This article provides an overview of IPE theory with particular attention to the role of international institutions. It begins with a brief outline of the early origins of the field, and then provides a survey of OEP. In Section 4, I offer a sympathetic critique of the emergent paradigm that aims to integrate concerns of some critics and identify the agenda for future research. Most important, this critique highlights the role and consequences of certain simplifying assumptions commonly used in OEP and calls for a closer examination of how international institutions and policies structure and change the interests of actors within countries that are now taken as exogenous. By relaxing these peripheral assumptions within OEP, I show how the emergent paradigm can address at least some of the criticisms raised by less sympathetic commentators.
IPE focuses on the politics of international economic exchange. It is a substantive area of inquiry, rather than merely a methodology in which economic models are applied to political phenomena. The field is primarily informed by two sets of key questions. First, how, when, and why do countries choose to open themselves to transborder flows of goods and services, capital, and people? In other words, what are the political determinants of what we now call globalization? In this first set of questions, openness is the dependent variable, or outcome to be explained, and politics (defined broadly) is the independent or causal variable. Economic theory posits that free and unrestricted international commerce is, with limited exceptions, welfare improving; many politically naïve analysts, in turn, expect countries to evolve toward free trade. By contrast, IPE begins with the reality that openness is historically rare, problematic, and a phenomenon that itself needs to be explained. Second, how does integration (or not) into the international economy affect the interests of individuals, sectors, factors of production, or countries and, in turn, national policies? Here, politics is the dependent variable and how the actor is situated in the international economy is the independent variable. In reality, of course, these two sets of questions are themselves integrated. For pragmatic purposes, however, nearly all analysts study just one half of the causal circle.
Political scientists and, increasingly, economists are studying in detail how domestic institutions aggregate interests. OEP is consistent with and draws heavily on the literature on comparative political institutions, much of which is not connected immediately to economic policy (see Cox 1997; Tsebelis 2002). There are many diverse strains in this literature, but among the more relevant findings for IPE are:
Our understanding of how institutions aggregate interests is far more advanced for democracies than for democratizing or autocratic states. Interest aggregation in non-democratic or newly democratic states remains an important area for future research.
OEP recognizes, in a way that the earlier domestic interests approach did not, that interests are central but not enough. However well specified, interests are refracted through political institutions that often have an independent effect on policy choices. What remains distinctive about OEP, however, is its insistence on explicit theorizing of both interests and institutions.
Together, interests, institutions, and international bargaining explain the choice of policies by countries and the outcomes experienced by the world economy. As suggested, OEP proceeds towards an explanation in a linear, unidirectional fashion. Although any one analysis may focus more or less on a single step in the causal chain, any complete explanation begins with interests, proceeds to examine the role of domestic institutions, and concludes with bargaining in international institutions and, then, ultimately the policy or outcome to be explained. As I shall argue below, this linear structure of the theory also forms one of its principle limitations.
Second, OEP emphasizes deductive rigor. Political scientists, especially, have benefited from powerful theories developed in economics. Economists, in turn, have been prompted to take politics and political institutions seriously, and to integrate realistic understandings of political processes into their models. Scholarly debate has forced all to clarify the assumptions they make, revealing strengths and limitations, and to state propositions in clear and falsifiable ways, thereby opening arguments to empirical test. By working within agreed standards of scientific inquiry, scholarly interactions and cumulative knowledge are facilitated.
Reflecting its status as an emergent paradigm, OEP has been the target of significant criticism. Critics charge that its conception of interests is too materialist and too narrow (Keohane 2009; Katzenstein 2009; Farrell and Finnemore 2009), that it ignores the constitutive (as opposed to regulative) power of institutions (Katzenstein 2009, 126), and that it disregards structural (as opposed to bargaining) power in the international economy (Keohane 2009, 39). In its focus on micro-level and individual incentives, it fails to pay sufficient attention or, worse, is blinded to big, macro-level changes in the international economy and lacks a synthetic interpretation of change (Keohane 2009). Leveled by some of the founders of modern IPE, these are valid criticisms that proponents of OEP need to take seriously.
Relaxing the small country assumption and recognizing that countries can act in ways that affect international prices, however, has two sets of effects that, although they can be incorporated into OEP, have not yet been theorized or considered at length. Both suggest that rather than being exogenous to politics, interests are in fact endogenous and the product of political strategies and manipulations.
By taking international prices as exogenous, OEP is blinded to these indirect or feedback effects on politics and policies in other countries. Tariffs need not be optimal to have profound effects not only on those who choose to use them but on the targets of these policies as well. Scholars of OEP need to be far more attentive to the general effects of policy-induced price distortions, and doing so first requires shedding the simplistic assumption that no country can affect international demand and supply. This form of structural power, as critics term it, matters. As noted above, both dependency theory and hegemonic stability theory, and the concerns that gave rise to these approaches, resonate with contemporary attempts to theorize more rigorously about how national actions affect relative prices and how these prices, in turn, alter domestic interests and policy. Although these prior analytic frameworks failed to mature into sound theory, this earlier work may yet prove to be fertile soil for new models of how international power matters in IPE.
For EoS trade, at least, interests can no longer be taken as exogenous to politics but may actually be the product of international politics. The pattern of comparative advantage and production in open economies is not set by factor endowments that are relatively slow to change, but by initial conditions combined with both chance and government policy. Explicating fully the distributional implications of EoS trade will be essential to further theoretical and empirical progress in OEP. If the distributional implications are as sensitive to initial conditions and actions by governments as current theory suggests, future OEP analyses will have to focus much more fully on the contingent, path dependent factors long emphasized by more historically oriented scholars. Importantly, however, a new focus on EoS industries will help OEP capture more elements of structural power and industrial dynamics in the international economy seen as both missing and central by its critics. 2b1af7f3a8