Surveys, Experiments, and the Landscape of International Political Economy

Pepinsky, Thomas B.

doi:10.1080/03050629.2014.899223

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Finally, the commentaries by Thomas Pepinsky (2014) and Dustin Tingley (2014) review the advantages and disadvantages of using survey research and experimental methods in IPE. Pepinsky's essay suggests that "surveys, survey experiments, individual-level data, and related microlevel research designs are an invaluable addition to the methodological toolkit of IPE."…”

Section: Downloaded By [Akdeniz Universitesi] At 00:24 20 December 2014mentioning

confidence: 98%

Introduction: Survey and Experimental Research in International Political Economy

Jensen

Mukherjee

Bernhard

2014

International Interactions

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Section: Downloaded By [Akdeniz Universitesi] At 00:24 20 December 2014mentioning

confidence: 98%

Introduction: Survey and Experimental Research in International Political Economy

Jensen

Mukherjee

Bernhard

2014

International Interactions

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“…Focusing on a narrow temporal scope privileges middle-range theories like open economy politics over more ambitious paradigms (Oatley, 2011). Even Lake (2013: 575) acknowledges that if actor preferences and identities change, it “shakes the foundations of [open economy politics], threatening to topple the entire superstructure.” The temporal link between paradigmatic assumptions and methodological approaches makes it far too easy to exclude rival explanations (Abbott, 1988; Pepinsky, 2014).…”

Section: Where Do We Go From Here?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and International Relations: a temporal view

Drezner

2020

European Journal of International Relations

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International Relations scholars are certain about two facts: power is the defining concept of the discipline and there is no consensus about what that concept means. One explanation for this problematic state of the field is that most International Relations scholars freight their analyses of power with hidden assumptions about time. Temporality is an essential component of political analysis, as a burgeoning literature has begun to explore. This paper argues that there are two latent presumptions about time that fundamentally affect how scholars conceptualize power in world politics. First, scholars are rarely explicit in defining the temporal scope of their key causal processes. The longer the implicit temporal scope, the more expansive their definition and operationalization of power can be. Second, there is considerable variation of beliefs about the temporal returns to power: does exercising or accumulating power generate positive or negative feedback effects over time? Relying on canonical works in the field, this paper examines the hidden assumptions that different paradigms make about power and time. Illuminating these assumptions clarifies the root of cross-paradigmatic disagreements about international politics and suggests some interesting pathways for future theoretical and empirical work.

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“…In a canonical article, for instance, Achen (2002: 437), uses microfoundations to refer to “a formal model of the behavior of the political actors under study” to guide our use of particular statistical estimators, a definition that need not imply that the mechanism connecting the explanans and explanandum is situated at a particular level of analysis. 4 Others cast the mechanistic implications aside and treat microfoundations as synonymous with the use of individual-level data more generally, a tendency noted with some unease by both Pepinsky (2014) and Jackson and Nexon (1999: 20, fn 322). Generally, both the meaning and the value of microfoundations are taken to be self-evident.…”

Section: The Microfoundational Momentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…if stable borders affect both the likelihood of conflict, and the likelihood of democracy, democracy and the probability of conflict should be intercorrelated, as Gibler (2007) shows), the causes of a construct can be independent. Finally, this type of multimethod research design is also helpful in thinking about situating experiments in context, complementing rather than supplanting observational or aggregate work (Pepinsky, 2014: 438).…”

Section: Resolve As a Latent Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It thus tells us a great deal that IR scholars seeking to contextualize their contributions are increasingly doing so with microfoundational arguments. Pepinsky (2014: 443) makes a similar point, noting with some concern the extent to which scholars using survey or experimental methods tend to reflexively “appeal to microfoundations” in order to justify their research designs, even if the ubiquity of the claim belies some murkiness about what microfoundations entail.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Microfoundations in international relations

Kertzer

2016

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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Many of our theories of international politics rely on microfoundations. In this short note, I suggest that although there has been increasing interest in microfoundations in international relations (IR) over the past 20 years, the frequency with which the concept is invoked belies a surprising lack of specificity about what microfoundations are, or explicit arguments about why we should study them. I then offer an argument about the value of micro-level approaches to the study of conflict. My claim is not that all theories of IR need to be developed or tested at the micro-level in order to be satisfying, but rather, that many of our theories in IR already rest on lower-level mechanisms—they either leave these assumptions unarticulated or fail to test them directly. In these circumstances, theorizing and testing micro-level dynamics will be especially helpful. I illustrate my argument using the case of resolve, one of the central explanatory variables in the study of international security. I argue that the absence of microfoundations for resolve is one reason why IR scholars have had difficulties testing whether resolve has the effects we often claim, and sketch out a two-stage research design political scientists can use to study unobservable phenomena.

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Surveys, Experiments, and the Landscape of International Political Economy

Cited by 9 publications

References 27 publications

Introduction: Survey and Experimental Research in International Political Economy

Introduction: Survey and Experimental Research in International Political Economy

Power and International Relations: a temporal view

Microfoundations in international relations

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