Global Trends in Militarization Needs Global Explanations

In my opinion, James Fearon misses an opportunity to link theories together in a productive way. Of the global decline of military spending (% GDP) and mobilization (soldiers per 1,000 citizens) in the postwar era:

On the domestic side of things, there is pretty good evidence that the spread of democracy has been a significant factor. Not worth getting into the details here, but if you look at the data country by country you find that on average, when countries transition to democracy their military spending and army sizes go down, quite substantially.* In fact they tend to go down when they transition from very autocratic to only somewhat autocratic (that is, to “anocracies”, or semi-democracies using the Polity data). The effect of a democratic transition on arms levels in the state in which the transition occurs looks to be larger than the effect of transitions in neighbors on a state’s own military spending, although this is hard to be sure about statistically due to endogeneity issues. I would guess that most of the democracy effect is a domestic matter—for instance, autocracies want bigger militaries to help put down domestic opposition or to pay off cronies, or democracies want smaller militaries to lower coup threats—but some of it might also be an international effect. That is, if democracies want smaller militaries then this could reduce the demand for big armies in their neighbors.

Fearon is reporting a trend, not advancing a well-formulated argument, but I still think this is fairly weak. Here are some other things we know about violence in the postwar era:

-- Interstate violence is at the lowest point in the capitalist era. Given that, it makes perfect sense for military burdens to be at a low point as well. We do not know for certain why the world is so peaceful, but quite a lot of IR theory suggests that American hegemony (which Fearon does not mention) and nuclear weapons (which he does) may have something to do with it. Regarding the former, the American security umbrella covers other democracies and (sometimes) extends to countries transitioning to democracy -- the pacification and democratization of Europe since 1945 is obviously the most pronounced example -- so that could help explain the domestic patterns without telling a ad hoc story about democracies being worried about coup threats (which strikes me as being ahistorical and is in contradiction to the best evidence). Regarding the latter, technology should push down military cost burdens and personnel needed as more and more security mechanisms become computerized and/or automated, at least during times of peace. Nukes are part of that but so are drones, missile technology, cyber capabilities, etc. Given the decline of international conflict and the lower marginal costs of defense why wouldn't we expect the military burden to decrease?

-- As for the fact that the drop in military burden has happened most in democracies I'd note several things. First, it appears from Fearon's description that many democracies were quite heavily armed in the middle of the 20th century. In Fearon's graph at the link above this is quickly seen by the number of people per 1,000 that were in the military in 1945-1950 in "the West". Given that, I don't think a regime-type explanation works very well. Second, democracies are richer, and richer countries should (on average) spend less on their militaries as a percentage of GDP. That is, there is a almost certainly diminishing returns to spending on security: the 10 trillionth dollar spent on national defense will not get you as much security as the 10 millionth. Among consolidated democracies only the U.S. and Israel spend more than 3% of their GDP on their militaries, and I think there is general agreement that much of the American spending is due to rent-seeking, bureaucratic politics, and its ongoing hegemonic project rather than its regime type.

-- Almost all conflict which does occur in the international system is intra-state. Intra-state violence tends to happen more in non-democracies than in democracies. Countries in a state of conflict should dedicate more of their resources towards the military than countries in a state of peace. Therefore, because they are more peaceful, democracies should spend fewer resources on the military. The only wrinkle in this involves transitions to democracy, which often involve conflict. The way I read Fearon he's saying that after transitioning to democracy the military burden decreases; I'm not sure if his data could tell us what's happening during democratic transitions, but it would be interesting to know.

I'm nit-picking a bit here, albeit for a reason. Fearon found some interesting trends, reported them, and then thought-aloud about what might be causing them. There's nothing wrong with that. But the quick-reflex pivot to explanations based on local factors such as regime type is, for me, unsatisfying. Once one takes that step it makes it difficult to think about broader systems, and makes committing an ecological fallacy much more likely. If we're seeing a systemic trend -- lower military burdens everywhere -- then we should seek to make systemic arguments which can account for the trends. Too frequently we try to explain global phenomena by reference to local factors.

Cultural Amnesia: We Must Invest in STEM or We Will Lose the Future!

[E]ven in the lower grades I found evidence of a much stronger emphasis on science than we give in the US. It is quite probable that within a generation Russia may have twice as many well-trained scientist as we. Russian resources are separated by vast distances. Her climate is exceedingly difficult. Transportation problems will always be most serious. But much of her soil is rich in the elements which when combined with a severe climate produce a most vital type of human being.

This could have be said by almost any politician in the US today, with the possible substitution of China for Russia. But, via Brad DeLong, it was actually said by Henry Wallace in 1952. There was a lot of threat inflation concerning the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s, and much of it was related to the knowledge economy and how that translated into national security ("missile gap", etc) combined with a sense that the US had underestimated the USSR in the 1940s. Not all of this was unreasonable, as Tony Judt recounted in a wonderful 1997 essay in The New Republic on the Chambers/Hiss affair (it's collected in Reappraisals but I can't find it online), but it got blown out of all proportion: without Hiss (and Chambers' special pumpkin) there wouldn't have been McCarthyism, and in the end McCarthyism mostly served McCarthy. In a similar, now we know that many of the principles that dominated US foreign policy from 1960-1990 -- brinksmanship, domino theory, MAD -- were simply unnecessary dangers, as the Soviet Union was not nearly as capable as the US leadership imagined it was.

Is there a lesson to be learnt? Towards the end of the Cold War we heard a lot about institutional superiority -- "end of history" and all that. Some of it was hyperbole, but there is some shred of truth in it as well. We genuinely believe that some form of democratic capitalism produces better outcomes than other systems, and we genuinely believe that societies which have norms of liberté, égalité, et fraternité, even if they are imperfectly applied, fare better than those which do not. Maybe we should take our own rhetoric seriously, for once: maybe we should worry a lot less about scores on science exams of 13 year old Chinese, and focus instead on translating the principles of liberté, égalité, et fraternité into practice.

P.S. the whole speech by Henry Wallace linked above is well worth reading, and could possibly be useful in an Introduction to International Relations course. There's a lot packed into a short document: commitment problems, asymmetric information, perception/misperception, etc.

UPDATE: Thanks to Noah Smith for driving traffic here. For new readers I should note that, contrary to what Smith wrote, as a quantitative social scientist I have nothing against math and science education. To say the least. I do have an issue with politicizing math and science education as a national security imperative, however, particular when done in a zero-sum "either we win the future or the Russians Chinese win the future" way. I thought I'd made that clear, but perhaps not.

Against Ceteris Paribus Theories of International Relations, A Prelude

A quick hit from me, as I'm swamped with dissertation work and am also in grading purgatory. But this, via Tyler Cowen, is interesting:

Since 2008, in response to the economic downturn, most big European countries have cut defence spending by 10-15 per cent. The longer-term trends are even more striking. Britain’s Royal Air Force now has just a quarter of the number of combat aircraft it had in the 1970s. The Royal Navy has 19 destroyers and frigates, compared with 69 in 1977. The British army is scheduled to shrink to 82,000 soldiers, its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. In 1990 Britain had 27 submarines (excluding those that carry ballistic missiles) and France had 17. The two countries now have seven and six respectively.

And yet Britain and France are commonly regarded as the only two European countries that still take defence seriously. The British point out that, even after the current round of cuts, the UK will have the fourth-largest military budget in the world. Britain is also, for the moment, one of only two European nations to meet the Nato target of devoting 2 per cent of gross domestic product to defence – the other is Greece.

The situation in most other European countries is worse – Spain devotes less than 1 per cent of GDP to military spending. And much European military spending goes on pensions or pay, not equipment. The Belgians distinguished themselves in the Libyan campaign of 2011. But about 75 per cent of Belgian military spending now goes on personnel – causing one critic to call the Belgian military “an unusually well-armed pension fund”.

Britain and France now have one aircraft carrier... combined (they share it). What this means is that the US now accounts for 50% of the world's naval power.

Why does this matter? For awhile I've been hoping to carve out time for a short article with the working title "Against Ceteris Paribus Theories of International Relations". It is intended as a retort to those who claim, based on stylized comparative statics, that US military spending is essentially wasted and therefore those funds should be re-directed either to shoring up the social welfare state or tax rebates. (As of now I'm planning on targeting John Quiggin particularly, who has made similar arguments to these in especially egregious form on numerous occasions, but the scope may broaden, narrow, or shift in some other direction at the point of writing.)

In other words, the article will argue that if the US significantly lowered its military spending the effect would be dynamic, not static: an increase in security dilemmas worldwide, which would be marked by a large and sustained increase in military spending in the non-US world. The net effect could very well be great global military spending; this would be something of a tragedy on its own, since most military spending does not go to uses which expand human dignity and well-being. But it could be worse if security dilemmas lead to arms races which spiral into conflict.

The core of the argument will be this: take away 50% of the world's naval power... do you think anything else might change? Put into the language of economics, some sectors of the economy are natural monopolies; it just wouldn't be efficient to have 100 different telephone companies putting up poles all over the place. Similarly, from the perspective of global welfare, it is probably more efficient for the US to spend disproportionately on its military. There are downsides to this, of course, similar to market monopolies. Nevertheless, the most efficient outcome is likely for the US to out-spend the rest of the world to such an extent that security dilemmas (and concomitant arms races and conflict) do not result, accepting the negatives that go along with this positive.

Anyway, that paper is roughly 20th in the queue so I'll probably never get around to it.

Why Political Scientists Should Take Political Science Seriously

Warning: This post is intentionally inflammatory, over the top, and abrasive. Also, some claims are over-stated. Nevertheless...

So I was just going on a rant to my wife the other day about how we IR folks frequently waste our time because we don't know what other (non-IR) political scientists are doing. For example, the big trend in studies of trade politics now is to find new and novel ways to figure out what peoples' trade preferences are. So scholars are spending tons of time (and sometimes money) running surveys and experiments to figure out whether attitudes towards trade reflect sociotropic interests or self-interests.

All fine and good, but ultimately it just doesn't matter. Why? Because no election in American history  has ever been a referendum on trade policy.* Hardly any elections are decided on foreign policy more generally. Study after study shows that voters don't care about foreign policy, don't know about it, and don't change their vote because of it unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. That is, if IPE knew any damn thing about what political scientists who study American politics know we'd leave trade preference formation to the psychologists (and preference aggregation to the Americanists). And if security scholars actually took domestic politics seriously they likely wouldn't've wasted thousands of pages on audience costs, or the "transparency" of democracies vs. non-democracies as causing them to be more peaceful overall (which they aren't).

Instead, we've got reams of literature showing contradictory results regarding the link between trade preferences and policy, and the existence/non-existence of audience costs and democratic propensity for conflict, and then we try to figure out how to rectify these divergent results. Well the answer is to ignore them completely -- at least in the case of the U.S. -- because the supposed mechanism doesn't exist. We would know this if we paid attention to political scientists working in other sub-fields.

This is prompted by this post from Nexon:

Among other things, Saunders argues that theories of “democratic international relations” — particularly those surrounding audience costs — need to incorporate a central insight from the last fifty years of American politics research: that most voters are “low information”* when it comes to most things political–and especially foreign policy.** Thus, elites who provide “cues” to the voting public in general, partisans, ethnic groups, etc. are often key intermediaries in the relationship between foreign-policy and electoral pressures. ...

Saunders spent a lot of time walking us through arguments about low-information voters, partisan cueing, and various aspects of contemporary theories of political behavior. During the Q&A period, I asked her, basically, “why are you spending all this time telling us things we already know when you could be using that to further elaborate the implications for international-relations theory?” She responded that, in essence, when she presents the paper, “about half the time” she gets “that reaction”; “the other half of the time people are surprised.”

My reaction to this was, more or less, how could anyone working in political science in 2013 not know this stuff? I don’t mean know it well – I certainly don’t know a lot of the relevant literature or the intricacies of key debates — but rather: know the basic contours at all. And after the last few Presidential campaigns? I suspect most readers of this post will have the same reaction.

My reaction is that social scientists don't take social science all that seriously, and they take the work of other social scientists even less seriously. When was the last time an IR scholar cited The Macro Polity to note that foreign policymakers are generally not constrained by domestic mass politics?

I can't believe I'm even typing this, but despite its many (theoretical, empirical, rhetorical, etc.) flaws a book like The Israel Lobby is at least on the correct track. Foreign policy can be influenced by strong domestic interest groups and is influenced by strong domestic interest groups, so when IR folks study domestic politics we should probably focus on which groups are doing the influencing, rather than inferring causal relationships from mythical qualities of regime type.

I'm sure there are times and places in which foreign policy is exceptionally salient for mass publics. I know, for example, that common people pay lots of attention to exchange rates in Japan. I'm sure that the typical Greek pays more attention to central bank activities than the modal American. But to acknowledge this is to reinforce my point: if we in IR are going to theorize about domestic politics, we cannot simply assume that all polities are the same in all times and places. And we especially cannot do that when comparativists (yes, Americanists are comparativists) are telling repeatedly that that is not the case.

*This is not to say that campaigns will never use trade policy to target particular groups like, say, sugar growers in Florida or steel manufacturers in Ohio. They will. Occasionally winning the support of these groups might even be critical for winning elections. Interest group politics is real, and IR folks should be concerned with the phenomenon. But knowing what the median voter thinks on "trade" as a general intellectual concept just isn't very helpful.

Why Teach "The Clash of Civilizations"?

Phil Arena says we shouldn't, because it's not very good:

When folks like me joke that Huntington's CoC has detracted from the sum total of human knowledge, that it shouldn't even be taught in Intro IR classes because exposing students to it does more harm than good, it's the part I'm about to turn to that we have in mind more so than his claim that economic globalization has shrunk the world, or that economic integration has proceeded more rapidly at the regional level than the global level, or that dictators in the Islamic world might be threatened by the degree to which young people in their countries embraced American pop culture.

No, the big problem here is that Huntington claims that identity is immutable (even though some aspects of his argument clearly imply the opposite!). The fundamental problem with any argument linking ideational cleavages with conflict is that identity is malleable, and we have just as much evidence that conflict -> identity cleavages as we do identity cleavages -> conflict.

Characteristically, Phil cites some literature and goes into detail explaining just why he thinks this aspect of Huntington's argument, and others, is bogus.

I just taught "The Clash of Civilizations" in class today. I agree with every criticism Phil made of the article, and could add several others too. So do I feel chastised? No. Here's why:

1. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it's a terrible argument with no supporting evidence. That is, it is an object lesson in how not to think about global politics. It presents us with an 'in' to many issues of interest to us, including the one that Phil mentions -- identity is not immutable -- and is a good foil for alternative explanations of the ways global politics works. Because Huntington makes predictions which can be called into question empirically, it provides us with an opportunity to present an empirical depiction of the world as it actually is. Because we're examining claims with evidence, it gives us a good way to teach students how political scientists approach questions of interest.

2. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because everyone else is. Not just other political science classes, but sociology classes, global studies classes, etc. Because many of our students will encounter this idea in an academic setting either way, we should teach it in a way that provides them with good frameworks for rejecting it.

3. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it is our job to give students a sense of the intellectual trajectory of political theory related to the study of international relations. I always assign "The Clash of Civilizations" along with "The End of History," not just because the two speak directly to each other, but also to give students a sense of how the end of Cold War begat a period of intellectual confusion that (I think) largely persists into the present.

4. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it is frequently referenced by the popular media, by policymakers, and by lay-people. For whatever reason, the argument has traction in the broader culture. Many seem to find it intuitively appealing; I suspect that it reinforces some peoples' priors. In any case, if our students go home for Thanksgiving Break and a family member finds out that they're taking a course on international relations and asks them what they think of "The Clash of Civilizations" I want them to have an answer.

5. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because foreign policy discourse is frequently conducted in very crude "Us vs. Them" terms, and this provides us with an opportunity to question that entire mode of thought. Or at least to problematize exactly what we mean by "Us" and "Them": are these things defined by material interest? Identity? Ideals?

6. Finally, I think we need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because students seem to respond strongly to it, one way or the other. It is one of the few readings I routinely assign where this is the case.  It is, I think, something of a gateway drug: students either like it or don't like it, but they often aren't quite sure why. Teaching the article gives us a jumping-off point which we can use to engage many of the key concepts that will be developed in an introductory course.

IR Theory

-- Phil Arena has written a new post on it. Every time he does it's a must-read. This is the must-readest yet.

-- Dan Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson have a podcast on it. I haven't listened to it yet, as I'm at a conference this weekend, but I'm sure it will be good. I bit at PTJ's heels a bit when he posted at DoM on the subject, so I might have more to say later.

I'm at a conference on public choice. I'm hoping it will engage me on a number of levels, including blog-worthy topics. I'm already pondering one on how Tyler Cowen's recent focus on trust as essential for economic development may be (or may not be) related to Charles Tilly.

More later, time permitting.

I Can't Believe I'm Defending Waltz

Over at the Duck of Minerva, Patrick Porter takes issue with Kenneth Waltz's argument that it would be no horrible thing if Iran got the Bomb. Read those before you read this...

... So Porter's right about the trembling hand. But I don't think he's being fair to Waltz (and I'm not generally inclined to give Waltz the charitable reading, but the old man has a few points that Porter hasn't dealt with).

1. We're in probabilistic territory here. The question is not "would a nuclear exchange be horrible" or even "would the pursuit of more advanced weapons exacerbate some already-existing tensions". The question is "is the likelihood of bad outcomes higher or lower if Iran gets the bomb, relative to other feasible counterfactuals". In other words, we need to specify values for two variables: the probabilities for nuclear conflict and conventional conflict, and the likely cost of those conflicts. This is hard, but it's really the whole exercise. Suppose, over the next two decades, that there was a 1% chance of 10 million deaths from a nuclear exchange involving Iran, and a 30% chance of 1 million deaths from a conventional war involving Iran. If we had to choose between the two, we'd have to accept the possibility of a nuclear exchange as being objectively better. We don't get to choose "none of the above"... that's Waltz's point. Maybe you'd assign different probabilities and/or different costs to those outcomes, but the point is that Waltz is forcing us to be precise. It's not enough to just say "nuclear war would be horrible".

That's the whole reason why Waltz keeps citing India/Pakistan. Porter writes: "In the wake of 9/11, a Pakistani army general warned India that his country could launch a rapid nuclear attack, telling Alastair Campbell to remind the Indians: ‘It takes us eight seconds to get the missiles over.’ If this volatile frontier is a signpost of things to come in the Gulf, then the future is dark."

How so? It's been a decade since then, with no significant casualties. Tensions now are lower than they were before both states went nuclear, and the trend is in a positive direction. How is that a "dark future" relevant to feasible alternative scenarios?

2. Regarding missing Armageddon through luck... yes. And I agree that the trembling hand is not to be taken lightly. But it is not only present in nuclear exchange. Nuclear conflicts may be more likely to escalate more quickly than conventional wars -- although we don't really know, since it hasn't ever happened -- but other conflicts still escalate. Waltz's argument, which must be taken seriously, is that the very severity of a nuclear exchange mitigates the effect of the trembling hand. To use Porter's examples of close calls, the Soviet officers worked hard to dissuade their commander from firing nukes just in case it was a false alarm. The Kennedy administration held back in 1962 just in case there might be nuclear retaliation. They did these things precisely because nuclear war would be so horrible that they didn't want to chance it. At every knife-edge point we've had someone has made the decision that a nuclear holocaust would not be initiated by him. At every chance, the trembling hand has pulled back from the button. That observation does not mean that we'll always be so lucky, but it does imply that luck isn't the only factor in operation.

3. Suppose you disagree with my #1, and think that the probability of a nuclear exchange and/or the costs of one are higher than I've put down. If that is the case, then aren't you required to advocate for a pre-emptive strike against Iran? One can't have things both ways... either the risk of a nuclear Iran is acceptable or it is not. Porter doesn't make it clear where he stands on this question. But to criticize Waltz -- who does make it clear where he stands -- he must. Porter leaves the impression that Waltz is being flippant, but I don't think that he is. Waltz is making calculations. They may be "ahistorical" -- in fact they must be, since there is no history of mutual nuclear exchange -- and they may be based on Waltz's gut, but they are calculations nonetheless.

Waltz is right about one thing: there is a correlation between nuclear capability and peace. Perhaps the correlation is spurious. Perhaps not. But it is correlation, and it can't just be dismissed.

Poetry, Prose, Propaganda, Policy, & Paradigms: Drezner vs. Drezner (And Me)

A few weeks ago Dan Drezner called me "curiously lazy" for writing that we shouldn't pay much attention to what presidential candidates say about foreign policy during campaigns, especially when they say things like this:

At some point Romney will be asked direct questions about foreign policy. When he [is] asked those questions he will say things like "I will get tough with China to make sure they play by the rules and stop stealing American jobs" and "I will not let terrorists kill American citizens, and I will do whatever is necessary to keep Americans safe" and "I will keep America strong by not cutting our military budget" and "Screw Russia".

While Drezner acknowledged in that post that campaign rhetoric is just campaign rhetoric, he suggested that Romney still needed to talk more about foreign policy in order to "demonstrat[e] leadership" over his campaign, whatever that means. Now Drezner says:

So, does it matter for policy? Well.... no. 

Mario Cuomo once said "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." Now, Mario Cuomo was clearly the world's worst poetry connoisseur. Still, to update his observation for our current needs, we can say, "You campaign as a mercantilist; you govern as a free-trader." The reason that Romney has seemed so discombobulated by the Bain attacks is that he's been China-bashing since Day One ofhis campaign, so it's tough to then flip-flop pivot to a free trade stance. ... 

As stomach-churning as I find this kind of ad, I must reluctantly agree with Yglesias and Brooks that it doesn't matter all that much for governing. ... 

I don't think the mercantilist campaign rhetoric will amount to much.

Right. So: Romney's gonna say nationalist stuff, he's gonna say mercantilist stuff, and you shouldn't pay attention to any of it because it won't have an effect on policy or the election. Same for Obama. This is pretty much exactly what I said in my "lazy" post, which concluded thusly:

This is not meant to say that Romney's foreign policy decisions will not be important. They will be. It's just that we won't learn much about what they will be from any campaign statements.

Drezner is so chagrined by all this foreign policy talk (which he asked for) that he anticipates the next few months of the campaign will be "nauseating". Perhaps. If so, and assuming he's not a masochist, he might be well-served to take my initial advice: just don't pay attention to it. It's not lazy; it might even be wise.

(The only other similarity between our two posts? Drezner refers to "campaign bluster" where I write "campaign blather". I also refer to "bloviating". I prefer my choice of 'b'-words, but I suppose that's a matter of preference.)

(One last little thing: Drezner argued, contra me in my "lazy" post, that Romney -- being a smart guy -- surely knows the difference between neoconservatism and realpolitik. I know of no reason to believe this is true. Certainly Romney himself has given us no reason to believe this is true. James Joyner sees Romney's foreign policy as "realist". Jacob Heilbrunn sees it as neoconservative. Romney talks about a "new American Century" -- neocon -- but thinks we'll bring that about by balancing against the rise of China and Russia (!) -- realist. Mostly he seems to think that the U.S. should be strong, which is congruent with both neoconservatism and realpolitik. So you tell me.)

The Importance of Actors in Networks

(Apologies for the light posting. Real work plus a family emergency has gotten in the way. Normal posting should continue for most of the rest of the summer.)

Ben O'Laughlin recently attended a talk given by Anne-Marie Slaughter to the British Parliament that focused on how the Clinton State Department is trying to lay the groundwork for perpetuating the U.S.-led liberal order. For those who have followed Slaughter's career, both as an academic and as a former senior advisor in Clinton's State Dept, the basics should not surprise. She's a strong advocate of leveraging networks to embed the U.S. at the center of the global system. She believes that one way to do that is via "smart power", a term coined by Joe Nye* and popularized by Sec. Clinton, that emphasizes persuasion as a complement to capabilities. What I found interesting, however, was the way that the State Dept is going about this:

Slaughter began by saying that structures are being put in place whose effects won’t be visible for some years. The structures the US is building are informed by the assumption that the biggest development in international relations is not the rise of the BRICs but the rise of society – “the people” – both within individual countries and across countries. The US must build structures that harness societies as agents in the international system. Slaughter returned to Putnam’s (1988) two-level game, the proposition that it is in the interaction of international and domestic politics that governments can play constituencies off against one another to find solutions to diplomatic and policy dilemmas. Slaughter took up this framework: the US administration must see a country as comprised of both its government and its society, work with both, and enable US society to engage other countries’ governments and societies. The latter involves the US acting not as “do-er” but as “convenor”, using social media and organising face-to-face platforms for citizens, civil society groups and companies to form intra- and international networks.

Critically, these two levels are flat. This took me by surprise. At the society level, citizens, civil society groups and companies are connected horizontally. No particular group or individual is afforded a priori centrality. Why is this a surprise? Public diplomacy experts have spent the last few years trying to target ‘influencers’ in societies. Influencers are political, religious or cultural figures who are listened to by others. This idea is informed by network analysis, marketing, and the idea that State Department messages are more credible in different parts of the world when mediated and delivered by a local influential figure than by Hillary Clinton on TV. Slaughter was not convinced by reliance on influencers, empirically or normatively. She argued that all the millions marketers have spent still hasn’t generated any clear knowledge about how influencers can be identified and utilised. Not only that, but it is surely preferable to try to engage whole societies and treat all individuals equally. That would flourish a greater democratic ethos than appealing to amenable clerics, companies, journalists and intellectuals in the hope they might spread the word downwards.

The bold is added and it's the part that I'm not sure about. A few lines up Slaughter says (via O'Laughlin) that she is "not convinced" on the empirical evidence that influencers are, erm, influential. I wonder why, because it as far as I can tell it's a pretty robust finding across many differential fields that use network analysis.** In network terms, "influencers" generally have a high "degree", meaning that they are at the center of the network and many other actors in the network are linked to them. In many cases, non-central actors are not linked in any way but through the central actor. So if you want to gain influence in the network you get the most bang for the buck by influencing the influencer.

Moreover, once established influencers tend to remain influential. This is because they are already influential. And influencers tend to become influential because of some intrinsic quality. Let's take an example. Bill Gates became influential because of his ability to make personal computing user-friendly and accessible, an intrinsic attribute. But once he gained an initial influence advantage he was able to gain even greater influence simply because he was already influential. This is not an intrinsic attribute of Gates', but rather what is called a "network externality". That is, one advantage of using Gates' products is that many other people are using Gates' products. So Gates attracts new followers largely because he has already attracted followers. In fact, Gates has been able to continue doing this despite the fact that his new products have arguably been inferior, relative to its competitors' products, than his early products. At this point Gates' position as an influencer is almost solely due to his position as an incumbent influencer.

How does this relate to Slaughter's program? It's all fine and good to engage everyone in the world with the U.S.'s message, to encourage everyone to think like stakeholders, and to try to build large coalitions that are broadly supportive of the U.S.'s interests (or at least are not reflexively against them). But this is a very high-cost, low-yield strategy. As O'Laughlin goes on to note, this is a very long-term plan with no guarantee of success. I'd add that if the U.S. cannot simultaneously get the influencers on its side then it is very likely not to succeed in buttressing the liberal order. And if the U.S. can get the influencers on its side then it is very likely to succeed whether it appeals directly to each individual in the world or not.

There's no reason not to do both, but a tactical change from targeting influencers to targeting everyone is misguided, in my view.

What I find interesting about this is contrasting Slaughter's approach with someone like John Ikenberry's. They have both spent their careers theorizing about the liberal order and the U.S.'s hegemonic relationship with it, and have co-authored a bunch of pieces on the subject, but seem now to have diverged in what they think about what needs to be done for it to persist. Ikenberry continues to stress the importance of international institutions, particularly formal institutions. Slaughter has also emphasized formal institutions in the past, particularly legal institutions, but seems not to be shifting focus. There is nothing contradictory about the contemporary work of Ikenberry and Slaughter, but they have diverged a bit in the points they've chosen to emphasize.

*I can use the diminutive because I met him once. That's all it takes, right?

**For one recent study in international relations relating specifically to advocacy networks, see this piece by Charli Carpenter.

More on IR, Professionalization, Etc.

Dan Nexon linked to my response to his post on the horrors of the professionalization of international relations students and called it a cage match, but then was very gracious thereafter (despite misspelling my name twice). Still, I agree with some parts more than others. For example, I love this part:

On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job).

Me too! Let's hope he's on a hiring committee next year. But Nexon seemed me to want me to come back strong, so here we go. To his quibble:

But while some of my comments are applicable to all journals, regardless of orientation, others are pretty clearly geared toward the "prestige" journals that occupy a central place in academic certification in the United States.

Sure. The prestige journals don't thrill me with everything they publish either. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard any political scientist ever say "You know what? I really really loved the most recent issue of APSR. I had no problems with it at all. None. It was perfect. Every article was great." I have heard complaints from nearly every possible corner on almost every conceivable level about almost every article published (at least those that are even noticed). The old saying "If you're making everyone unhappy then you must be doing something right" is a sophistry, but in this situation it's pretty hard for the "prestige" journals to escape criticism. They mostly publish the sort of research that is mostly being done. Does that leave less space for less common approaches? Yes, by definition, but what else can they do? There are niche journals for niche paradigms and mainstream journals for mainstream paradigms.

Does that lead to path dependence? I'm sure it does. Again, what else can be done? Path dependence is a favorite causal explanation for social scientists when analyzing other social systems... why should we think we're any different?

Is this healthy for the discipline? I don't know. That's not hand-waving... I actually don't know. Anyway, there's an element of have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism that always bothers me in these discussions. E.g., in comments to Nexon's post, PTJ -- for whom I have a lot of respect -- responded to something I wrote thus:

It may not take a philosophical commitment to understand what a Gaussian distribution is, but it takes a philosophical commitment to consider it relevant. Ditto discourse analysis. Methods are portable; methodologies are not.

This reminds me of the tired old Keohane/Tickner You-Just-Don't-Understand "debate".* It seems somewhat perverse to me to take a position that sums to "I reject everything you do, I reject your epistemology and your ontology, I consider your entire intellectual approach to be invalid (if not oppressive), and oh by the way it's really screwed up that you aren't publishing me in your journals" or maybe "I don't consider what you do to be 'relevant' but it's so not fair that you feel the same way about me".

I am caricaturing but only just. Put another way: If critical theorists were 95% of the APSR I doubt they'd be demanding more neopositivist articles for pluralism's sake. Alternatively, neopositivists aren't demanding equal time in Alternatives. I'm all for letting a thousand flowers bloom, but that doesn't mean I expect them all to flourish equally in all climates. Nor do I know how I could make that happen even if I wanted to.**

I understand that there are things at stake. Jobs, promotions, etc. I don't take that lightly. On the other hand... this is the profession. No profession equally weights every preference or caters to every idiosyncrasy and academia does better than most.*** There are outside demands, there is an externally-imposed incentive structure, etc. The way that those shape grad student behavior was the subject of my previous post. Does that mean that I've not engaged in some types of inquiry that might be fun or interesting for me to pursue? Yes. But what I'm doing now is fun and interesting too, and it's not clear to me that I'd be better off -- intellectually or otherwise -- with fewer institutional/disciplinary constraints.

Back to Nexon:

Of course, most of what we do in graduate school should be about learning methods of inquiry, albeit understood in the broadest terms. The idea that one does this only in designated methods classes, though, is a major part of the problem that I've complained about. As is the apparent bifurcation of "substantive" and "methods of inquiry."And if you didn't get anything useful out of your "substantive" classes because you hadn't yet had your coursework in stochastic modeling... well, something just isn't right there.

I don't think there's much space between us here. I will say that one difference between "methods" classes and "substantive" classes (in my experience) is that methods classes contain students from all subfields of political science as well as other disciplines so a strong applied substantive focus is not feasible. Nor is it necessarily desirable. Similarly, "substantive" classes are taught by -- and attended by -- folks with high varied methodological backgrounds. I think methods classes should be fairly theoretical. UNC is, I think, well above the mean in this regard -- we don't just teach folks how to type 'reg y x' into Stata and then let them loose into the world -- but the point is that a strong methods training isn't bounded by substantive interest.

As some other students have said, it's not that I didn't get anything useful out of my substantive classes in my first year or so... it's just that I got very little. Mostly, it was learning what was out there. Kind of. For that I spent hundreds of hours, and had to go back and re-read everything (related to my research at least) once I had a better sense of what was actually going on in these articles. Not all of that was methods-related but a lot of it was.

And I agree... something just isn't right there. That was my whole point. From what I can tell from other grad students who contacted me after my last post, this isn't an uncommon experience. I'm not sure what can be done about it except for demanding more from undergraduates. Quite a lot of grad students' time is wasted -- in the sense that it is a prerequisite for later productive work but there is a "burn-in" period -- and this might just be one of those things.

*FWIW, I think both sides came off awfully in that exchange, and there's something half-shameful in professional educators not being able to communicate their ideas in such a way as to at least understand each other.

**A commenter on Nexon's post picked up on something I'd hinted at in my previous post: that incentives within the academia are -- to at least some extent -- dictated by the non-academic job market. Call me a dirty neopositivist, but opportunity costs are real.

***All of this is well beyond even "First World Problems". I generally find this kind of navel-gazing to be embarrassingly self-important. Yet here I am.

Academia vs. Policy Snark

Andrew Exum, today:

Nonetheless, in case anyone is interested, these are the [academic] journals I dutifully scan for articles, listed in the order I typically read them. ...

3. The American Political Science Review

Andrew Exum, 2010:

Anyway, you guys could probably care less why I never read the APSR. 

Wonder what made him change his mind.

On IR Professionalization, Grad School, and What I Think I've Been Doing for the Past Four Years

Dan Nexon has written a lengthy diatribe opposing what he calls the "over-professionalization" of IR, particularly as it involves graduate student instruction. Over-professionalization seems to reduce to, basically, extensive training in neopositivist approaches (mostly but not only quantitative) to the study of international relations, with less space for idiosyncratic approaches. Nexon believes this has led to, and is leading to, an impoverishment of IR theory. It's well worth reading, as is Erik Voeten's critique, and comments on both posts.

No one has responded to Nexon from my perspective -- a grad student about to go onto the job market -- and I've been thinking a decent amount about these issues lately, so I'm going to chime in. Before I get into more specific discussion, let me note that it's been very interesting to watch the ways in which my approach to grad school has evolved over the past four years, and the ways in which my fellow grad students have taken different approaches to their time in grad school. For me, having an academic career is only valuable if I can do it more or less my way. I'm not a "careerist" in that sense... if what it takes for me to get a job at a good school is to do a bunch of work that I don't enjoy or find interesting, then I don't want a job at a good school. I'd much rather have a place at a lesser school or in a non-academic setting. Therefore, I'm somewhat risk-acceptant regarding both my professionalization (evidence: my willingness to pick blog fights with tenured faculty) and my research program (which carries a nonzero chance of being an abject failure). Some of my fellow graduate students don't seem to feel the same way, and they make their choices accordingly. There's nothing at all wrong with that, it's just not the approach I'm comfortable taking.

At this point I have almost no idea what the values of "the discipline" at large are, and I'm somewhat skeptical that there is any such thing.* It seems to depend very much on which departments we're talking about, and even then it's somewhat contingent upon the balance of recent hires/turnover within departments. Same with the journals. While different journals (naturally) tend to publish different types of work, it's not clear whether that is because authors are submitting strategically, editors are dedicated to advancing their preferred research paradigms, both, or neither. There are so many journals that any discussion of them as doing any one thing -- or privileging any one type of work -- seems like painting with much too wide a brush. Nevertheless, on to Nexon's claims.

Perhaps ironically, I think the phenomenon that Nexon is trying to describe (to the extent that it exists at all) is best understood using language taken from formal bargaining theory. That is, in an environment where competition for any decent academic job is fierce -- much less a so-called "top tier" job -- there is no possible way that grad students will not be "over-professionalized". Grad students will always be incentivized to game the job market as best as they can, and their advisors and departments are incentivized to help them do it. The job market rewards graduate students that can strongly signal an ability to maintain a productive research agenda into the indefinite future. Even if the efficient outcome is for a less professionalized discipline (if e.g. it leads to more interesting theorizing), and Nexon does little to establish the case that it is (more below), those who defect and become more professionalized are more likely to get jobs because they will be the ones who can better signal their quality to hiring departments. In politics it is often said that you can't enact the policy without being elected, and you can't have a long career doing interesting research in IR without first getting hired somewhere. Getting a job is therefore the first goal of every student, advisor, and department. There is no other measure of success, nor can there be.

From where I sit, as a grad student there appear to be only so many ways you can signal your value to hiring committees that receive tons of applications for each job -- particularly if you're coming from a department outside of the top 10. One way is to demonstrate mastery over difficult material and/or techniques for inquiry that will be useful in conducting research over a long career. Another is by having work published -- indicating that you actually can do research -- and in progress -- indicating that you don't have only one decent idea -- and by getting well-regarded scholars to write strong letters on your behalf. For the first, taking an extra methods course adds to the "toolkit" in ways that taking an extra class out of your major field does not. Or hell, even within your major field, if it's on a topic that isn't directly relevant to your dissertation. Sure, the substantive class will expose you to new ideas, but nothing's stopping you from reading those books on your own. The value added of discussing the substantive work in seminars with other grad students who only had time to skim the reading is almost surely less than the time spent learning a new method. Having more training in more methods gives you a greater ability to ask a wider range of questions and a greater ability to answer them. We're always being told to not let method determine research question, but if you only know one method you have no other option. Moreover, without some methodological chops it is difficult to conduct research that is publishable (the second signal) or that is interesting enough to excite jaded faculty that are writing letters for you (the third). In short, it's important for graduate students in political science to be able to do political science. Methods training is a prerequisite for that.

Unlike Nexon, I don't see this as a very bad thing.** I've taken more methods classes in my graduate education than substantive classes. I don't regret that. I've come to believe that the majority of coursework in a graduate education in most disciplines should be learning methods of inquiry. Theory-development should be a smaller percentage of classes and (most importantly) come from time spent working with your advisor and dissertation committee. While there are strategic reasons for this -- signaling to hiring committees, etc. -- there are also good practical reasons for it. The time I spent on my first few substantive classes was little more than wasted; I had no way to evaluate the quality of the work. I had no ability to question whether the theoretical and empirical assumptions the authors were making were valid. I did not even have the ability to locate what assumptions were being made, and why it was important to know what those are. Those questions, which are central to any study in political science (or should be, anyway), can only be answered once one has some sense of how theory is constructed, how models perform, how data is collected and analyzed, and why every choice made by the analyst is important. Coming into grad school I didn't have that ability despite having being fairly comfortable with basic statistics (what Nexon lumps into GLR -- "general linear reality") and models as an undergraduate economics major. (In my opinion it's still a weakness for me, and for nearly everyone I come across in academia.)

The fact remains: students at architecture schools are not asked to design a skyscraper on the first day. Someone taking their first saxophone lesson is not encouraged to abandon traditional chord structures in favor of free improvisation. Nor would it be productive for most graduate students to be "thinking outside the box" during their early years in graduate school. At that point I didn't even know where the box was. I couldn't possible have been any less professional, and so I was incapable of producing anything of theoretical or substantive value. I don't think a single one of my grad student colleagues was any different.

More importantly, I don't think that learning a bunch of methods closed off avenues of research for me; on the contrary, it opened them up! Learning that not every real-world variable has a Gaussian distribution, that assumptions regarding the data-generating process are very important, that (yes) not every process in the world is linear, that bias can come in all shapes and sizes (regardless of what method one uses, and I don't just mean quant here)... this is important knowledge to possess! I could not acquire it without "professionalizing" myself.

So with the caveat that he has much more experience and knowledge than me, I don't think I can agree with Nexon's core argument: that professionalization of graduate students has led to a lack of interesting theorizing. I believe a decent amount of professionalization is a prerequisite for understanding how good theories are constructed and how they may be evaluated. I do think that there is not all that much interesting theory being produced in IR currently, but I think that's because it's really hard to come up with original theory. Not just in IR... theoretical development moves slowly in all sciences. Most of the work is in pushing at the edges of existing theory in more-or-less straightforward empirical ways.*** It takes something approaching genius to develop original theories and let's face it... most graduate students (and professors, practitioners, and lay-people) just don't possess the necessary quality whether they've been professionalized or not.

If there is one thing that I wish I had spent more time on in my graduate classes it would be taking the philosophy of science more seriously. I suspect, from other things he's written, that Nexon would agree. Other than the first-semester scope and methods class -- which came too soon to be of much use, and doesn't seem to be conducted super-rigorously almost anywhere -- attention paid to the philosophy of science has been spotty, sporadic, and mostly ad hoc. This is, I believe, a problem with social science more generally and not just graduate instruction at the top 20 (or so) IR grad programs. But such a focus would almost necessarily have to lead to more professionalization rather than less.

*When we discuss what "IR" wants in terms of hiring decisions, it seems relevant to note that hiring decisions are generally made by departments as a whole and not just the IR people. I'm sure that in many cases faculty from other disciplines will defer to IR people when making IR hires, but I imagine that there's quite a lot of variation there.

**I'm not sure he does either. He seems to be saying different things at different times. I think what he'd like to say is that a strong methods training would be a very good thing if it didn't lead to the sort of professionalization that he doesn't like. But he doesn't quite say that, and I can't tell if it's really true.

***On a somewhat related point, tangential to my post as well as Nexon's: if I was more familiar with the literature I think I'd like to write a post arguing that political "science" must mean something specific. Political practice is different from political science, and I think there are a lot of uses in keeping the distinction between normative and positive theory intact. The falsifiability criterion seems to me to be as good as any. I think there are good reasons for arguing that certain types of theory is not political "science" without diminishing its utility for people who are interested in politics, theories about the world, etc. The word "science", if it is to have any meaning, must distinguish between styles of inquiry based on their approach, their methodology. I'm not sure where that line falls, but it must exist.

Conflict Scholars Should Learn Political Economy If They Want to Talk About Political Economy

First off, apologies for the light posting. A confluence of events have prohibited more activity here. I hope to get going more regularly.

I want to call brief attention to this post from LFC at Howl of Pluto, an excellent and under-appreciated IR/FP blog. Here's the meat:

Maybe Phil [Arena] could consider taking an occasional break from criticizing Reiter and Stam's enthusiasm about democracy and focus on the particular forces that drive bad, suboptimal policy in the particular democracy known as the United States. There are, after all, varieties of democracy, just as there varieties of capitalism. The problem isn't so much democracy per se as the particular form it is taking in the U.S. today.

You don't have to agree with the conclusion to see a problem with the logic. I've consistently followed Phil's postings, and a regular theme is that he is skeptical of claims in the academic literature that "democracy" does this or "democracy" does that. Part of Phil's whole point, as I read him (and I hope/expect that he'll comment on his own at some point) is precisely that "there are varieties of democracy". Moreover, that democracy does not always lead to peaceful, warm, open, transparent outcomes that track to some utilitarian ideal. So when he picks on Reiter and Stam he's doing it from that perspective: a general skepticism of the way that much IR literature talks about democracy, attributes unidirectional causal properties to it, and generally over-idealizes a regime category that -- as LFC notes -- retains plenty of space for all sorts of varying outcomes.

In other words, I imagine Phil would be fine with the bureaucratic-politics-plus-interest-groups story that LFC puts forward, and nothing he wrote contradicts it. (Unlike me, Phil's pretty good about remaining agnostic about things he doesn't possess extensive knowledge about.) The problem is that quite a lot of the IR conflict literature wouldn't be okay with a story where narrow interest groups within a democratic society skew policy in a suboptimal way. Including Reiter and Stam, at least if you give them a literal reading.

Of course, because I'm self-interested, it's easy for me to sum all this up and conclude that the problem is that conflict scholars don't understand political economy.

Weekend Links

-- A long, excellent interview with Patrick Thaddeus Jackson at Theory Talks (a generally excellent site; it's easy to lose hours in there), concerning IR and the philosophy of science. I haven't yet had the chance to read PTJ's newest book, but it's in the pile and I look forward to it.

-- The Economist enlists Larry Summers and Donald Kohn in a role-play, asking them to deal with the imminent collapse of a major bank using the new tools provided by Dodd-Frank.

-- Matthias Matthijs and Mark Blyth read Kindleberger in Berlin. I hope to have more to say about this later.

-- Is it surprising that the US's financial troubles had a larger effect on Europe than Europe's financial troubles have had on the US? Not to me, as regular readers would expect.

-- Weber, "Science as a Vocation". I find it somewhat odd that "Politics as a Vocation" ends up on many social science syllabi while "Science" does not, given that social scientists want to be scientists not politicians. Or maybe my experience has been unique.

-- "The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674". One of my favorite historical documents, brought to memory by this article on rising global coffee pries.

-- The Piedmont (which includes my town) has a local currency, in operation since 2002. I've never seen it used.    

Is This Really True? QOTD

From an article on the multidisciplinary influence of Kahneman and Tversky:

Political scientists use prospect theory to model foreign-policy decision making. Some international-relations scholars argue that cognitive biases favor hawkish policies, making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end. (Kahneman shares that view.)

That's the only part of the article discussion IR (no hypen needed) or other political science. I'll admit that I don't follow the FP decision-making lit very closely, but this doesn't ring true to me. Yes, the classic Kahneman/Tversky prospect theory article was on my Intro to IR Theory first-year syllabus, but it was tucked into the "Other Approaches" week at the end of the semester. I have to say that I've come across few major IR articles that have explicitly adopted a behavioralist frame.

Perhaps others can fill in the gaps in my education. I welcome comment.

Military Spending and the Value of Lives

John Quiggin has a post at Crooked Timber that asks us to think about opportunity costs when considering how allocate resources from the public purse. The title is, I think, not only needlessly provocative -- "Has the U.S. Defense Department Killed One Million Americans Since 2001?" -- but also clearly wrong. If anyone can be considered guilty of that offense it would be the Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama rather than DoD, but setting that aside he makes a valid point:

I’ve spent the day at a workshop on benefit-cost analysis where a lot of discussion is on valuing policies that reduce risks to life of various kinds. US policy, for better or worse, is focused on the idea of Value of a Statistical Life. Typically a policy that reduces risks of death will be approved if the cost per life saved is below $5million, and not otherwise. (There are similar numbers applied to publicly funded health care services, prescription drugs and so on, usually per year of life saved). 

The numbers are quite striking. The ‘peacetime’ defense budget is around $500 billion a year, and the various wars of choice have cost around $250 billion a year for the last decade (very round numbers here). Allocated to domestic risk reduction, that money would save 150 000 American lives a year.

So, since 9/11, US defense spending has been chosen in preference to measures that would have saved 1.5 million American lives. That’s not a hypothetical number – it’s 1.5 million people who are now dead but who could have been saved. I think its fair to say that those people were killed by the Defense Department, or, more precisely, by the allocation of scarce life-saving resources to that Department.

As happens on the best of days at CT, many of the comments are well worth reading. Leigh Caldwell made a few good points: 1) the marginal cost curve is not only not flat, it likely slopes upwards pretty quickly (so the nth life saved is much more expensive than the n-50,000th life saved); 2) to the extent that defense spending represents a global public good at all it likely saves some lives, and perhaps quite a large number. 'soru' notes:

US casualties in WWII were approximately half a million. Baseline assumption of planners, calibrated from the first half of the 20C, is that there is 40% chance of a conflict on that scale in any given decade.

So reducing that to a negligible chance saves ~200,000 US lives per decade, which is in the right order of magnitude. So by the time you account for the possibility of a worse (or just less successful) conflict, and the points mentioned above about the incidental benefits of defence spending, increasing marginal costs of other measures and so on, it starts to make sense on its own terms.

Others referenced deterrence spending by India and Pakistan, and other scenarios whereby military spending may have conflict sufficiently costly that it does not occur when it otherwise might have. When we teach Poli 150 -- Intro to International Politics -- we generally say that all military spending is inefficient in that it does not generate prosperity, but is nevertheless necessary to protect the prosperity that has been generated by other means. The implication is that, while military spending would be wasteful in a world with no threats, there exist threats and so some military spending is not wasteful. I think everyone involved in the discussion agrees that the US is currently spending too much on the military, but I also believe that cutting spending by something like 90% (or, as Quiggin mentions, 100%) would probably have some nasty knock-on effects.

As soru says, we're talking in probabilities here, and the differences don't have to be all that large for large amounts of military spending to be rational on its own terms. Moreover, you want to over-insure against tail risks with extremely negative potential consequences. Obviously counterfactuals are hard, but it is pretty clearly the case that spending zero percent of national income on defense would embolden others to attack, and spending one hundred percent of national income on defense is not only overkill but defeats the whole point of defense spending. So there is a margin where spending more on defense will "save lives" via deterrence, and there is some margin where increased spending will have a very small or null effect, and could thus profitably be diverted to other uses. The question then should be: where is the relevant margin?

I asked Phil Arena to write a post on what he thought were the best models addressing the question. He cited Slantchev (as I thought he might):

This is doing no justice to Slantchev's arguments, but to grossly oversimplify matters, he essentially argues that states can typically prevent war if they are willing to encourage sufficiently large costs.  

Military preeminence is a stated intention of American military spending, at least partially for this reason. Phil also referenced some of his own work in progress:

However, as I demonstrate in a working paper (a new version of which I will be posting sometime next month), there might be reason to expect that the effect of military spending on the probability of war depends in part on the baseline distribution of capabilities. I identify results where the challenger risks war with the defender if and only if the defender engages in costly military buildups, yet the defender is nonetheless willing to adopt such a strategy. And for that matter, defense spending by would-be aggressors may similarly either embolden them or allow them to extract such large concessions even when playing it safe that the overall risk of war will go down. Put simply, I think there is very good reason to assume that the relationship between defense spending and the probability of war is non-monotonic.

Which is precisely the relationship I described above. We're in Laffer-curve territory here, so it's no use belaboring the point. But it isn't difficult to see how a lot of US military spending -- perhaps even more than we now do -- could be cost-effective in the way that Quiggin describes if it were deployed with the intention of saving as many lives as possible. Tens of thousands of people die in horrible civil conflicts every year, most of which the US does not intervene in. Some of the US' interventions likely have saved many lives at relatively low cost (eg Kosovo and Libya) although the counterfactuals are, as always, very difficult.

But as Phil notes, the goal of most military spending is not saving lives at cost-effective margins. (This gets back to where Quiggin's wrong to point the finger at DoD rather than the legislature and executive.) Thus, criticizing DoD for not maximizing lives-saved is like criticizing the Yankees for not winning the Super Bowl: the DoD is playing a different game. Hell, the legislative and executive branches are playing a different game.

Quiggin should be criticizing the government for playing baseball rather than football. But if the government is guilty of massively misallocating resources in the same way over long time horizons then, as Phil hints, doesn't it make more sense to work towards reducing the ability of the government to misallocate resources rather than trying to force it to do something that it is clearly not well-constructed for? That's what I take away from Quiggin's post: shrink the government. If you don't, it'll spend the money on things that increases the capabilities of the government. I'm pretty sure this is not what Quiggin believes, but since this post isn't coupled with any theory of politics that allows the transference of military funds to other programs that do improve public health, it's hard to take his post any other way.

One last point: Phil notes that IR has a very poor understanding of the way that the systems work, as opposed to bilateral crisis bargaining. In other words, it isn't necessarily reasonable to infer from a model of a dyadic interaction to the broader system. I think this is especially true when talking about a superpower.

The Selectorate in Theory and Practice

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith continue their guest-posting at the Monkey Cage with this, which basically describes how time inconsistency problems can affect politics. (Michael Lewis recently wrote a case study of this process in California which, for all its faults, is better than his essays on Europe.) Before I get into my criticism, let me say that I value their work on selectorate theory, even though I think it has some problems. I value it for a few reasons: because I think the dynamics they are trying to model (basically a formalization of a strand of public choice econ) are very important for the study of politics even if their theory isn't a finished product, and because they provide a central theoretical paradigm for other scholars to use as a foil for their own research.

Anyway, enough throat-clearing. As this post, and the titles of their books on selectorate theory -- The Logic of Political Survival and The Dictator's Handbook -- make clear, theirs is a theory of comparative politics, not international relations. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves them susceptible to problems that scholars who primarily operate in one subfield often have when crossing over into another. Specifically, they tend to make assumptions that seem reasonable but are nevertheless highly contentious. This post illustrates one of them. BdM and Smith write:

It is certainly true that bankers and businessmen wrote loans they suspected would not be repaid; they buried debt on the balance sheet; and, in extreme cases, committed outright fraud. These actions, and hundreds of others like them, provide rewards today, accruing costs that must be paid in the future. Why run up so much debt? Easy, paying costs in the future is someone else’s problem. It certainly won’t be the executive’s problem if she does not survive at the top today. Business leaders happily – and smartly – mortgage their firm’s future to ensure that they retain control now. Lavish payments even when performance is poor is the norm, not the exception.  

As much as politicians chide business leaders, they too love debt. It lets them buy loyalty now. Repayment is some future leader’s problem. Politicians hate to pay as they go. They love to make expensive promises that they don’t have to fund. For instance, politicians love to pay public sector employees with modest wages and fantastic defined pension benefits. This means less to pay today on their watch and more to pay on someone else’s tomorrow. What could be better!

On the one hand this seems more or less incontestable: politicians would prefer to buy support now and have someone else pay later. As the theorize later in the post, autocracies are more prone towards debt accumulation than democracies. I'm sure this is true in many contexts, and Oatley has some recent research that backs it up, but the example they introduce as illustrative of the broader phenomenon -- the actions of bankers -- gives us reason to question their narrative. Bankers acted the way they did in part because of policies that rewarded this behavior. The financial sector profited enormously from the legal and regulatory structures in the United States and around the world over the past few decades, and there was always an expectation that the government would support them in times of trouble. The Fed made that guarantee via the Greenspan/Bernanke "put", and the fiscal authorities did as well, setting a clear precedent of interventionism through a series of fiscal interventions from 1980s-2000s.

In democracies the "selectorate" -- the group whose support politicians must maintain to stay in office -- is assumed by BdM/Smith to be 50% of the population, or near that number. And yet the most energized political movements on both sides of the ideological spectrum right now, the #OccupyWallStreet and Tea Party groups, both formed in large part in reaction to policies that benefited bankers over the masses. These policies were enacted by both major political parties in two different presidential administrations, and do not benefit 50% of the population. They benefit a very small minority of it, hence the "We are the 99%" slogan of #OWS. In general the economy of the US and other industrialized democracies has become much more unequal over the past several decades, and  there has been little or no movement towards redistribution to mitigate the trend. A more progressive tax system would definitely benefit more than 50% of the population, yet the government finds it very difficult to pass a several percentage point marginal tax increase on millionaires.

Not only can selectorate theory not explain this, it would predict the opposite. More generally it would expect the majority of the population in an increasingly-unequal society to favor highly redistributive policies, and it would expect politicians to respond to this demand. BdM/Smith might be on stronger footing if they adopted the Rajan thesis that the government countered stagnating median wages by expanding credit access, but even this would depend on the claim that 50% would prefer more credit to more income. This seems dubious.

It seems more likely, to me, that the idealized account of democracy that selectorate theory provides is incomplete. The strength of selectorate theory is that it can accomodate more complex accounts of preference creation and aggregation relatively painlessly, but the weakness of the BdM/Smith application of selectorate theory is that they seldom take the more complicated steps that are necessary to reach conclusions that match our empirical understanding of the world. That leaves us in a place where selectorate theory is potentially valuable if used with care, but the primary proponents of selectorate theory -- in emphasizing parsimony over accuracy -- end up reaching conclusions that are pretty clearly wrong.

PSA

A bunch of smart people (Downes, Fearon, Nye, others) discuss in print whether/why regime change doesn't "work". Perhaps of interest to some readers. I'll just say that regime change "works" almost every time we attempt it, in that we usually succeed in changing whatever regime we want to change. What doesn't "work" is subsequently establishing a liberal democracy that cow-tows to our every wish.* Which seems like another matter, distinct from "regime change" and requiring its own term. But I don't get to make the rules.

*The wish is seldom defined. Our own democracy never fulfills our own every wish, which I believe is a true statement no matter how you identify "our".

This Is Embarrassing

Mearsheimer, in August 1990: Europe will revert to "untamed anarchy" and "Hobbes' war of all against all" in the post-Cold War era.

Oops.

ht: Phil Arena 

Realism, Internationalism, and Networks

Henry Farrell characterizes the debate between Drezner and Slaughter as over "whether realism or networked internationalism best describes the basic contours of international politics" and thinks they're both wrong, preferring instead a view in which networks are important but that joint-gains functionalism is the wrong way to approach them: "If the kinds of international networked cooperation we see are all about struggles for resources, rather than achieving functionalist imperatives, then we may expect a very different international networked society than if these forms of cooperation are aimed at pursuing functionalist goals and Pareto-improvements". I read the debate, even more simply, as so:

Slaughter: Transnational networks are changing international politics by weakening or changing the role of the state, and this mostly leads to Pareto-improvements.

Drezner: Yeah, maybe, but states are still by far the most important actors in global politics and on many big-ticket items transnational advocacy networks have had little discernable effect. To the extent that non-state networks matter, it's largely because they change state preferences, not that they make states less relevant.

Farrell: Networks form for distributional reasons and states often cannot control them. In fact, states themselves are networks of politicians and bureaucrats. Networks transform politics via a complex process of contagion which is very difficult to predict ex ante.

Obviously some nuance is missing in these characterizations, but I think that's the gist of the argument. I have sympathy for all three views, but my own belief is that international politics operates somewhere in the space between Drezner and Farrell. That is, I think that networks play important roles in shaping international politics, but I think that their influence is best understood within the context of the state system. And despite the fact that international politics is comprised of a series of complex networks that interact, I don't necessarily think that "contagion" is the best way of thinking about these processes in all cases, nor that network behavior is a fundamentally mysterious phenomena.

Farrell and others cite the Arab Spring as a good contemporary example. According to one view, the "Arab Spring" is a "black swan" -- a rare event that is essentially unpredictable. I think Farrell would modify the Blyth-Taleb story about probability distributions into a network context, where "black swans" are now viewed as shocks to networks that diffuse through the system in idiosyncratic ways. In some cases the network may be transparent enough that we can predict how extreme shocks might affect the network, but in other cases we won't have that information, and anyway we can't know when or how the shocks will occur. In this view the Arab Spring is a phenomena that cascaded across state borders in a way that states could not understand much less control. Factor in social media and other coordinating devices -- which are networks themselves -- and it gets messy very quickly.

But the alternative view of the Arab Spring, which I believe is more or less the dominant view of those who study contentious politics, is that diffusion dynamics themselves are not enough to explain when revolutions succeed or fail.* Quite often it is the decisions of centrally-located actors that play the most significant role. For example, the Egyptian revolution succeeded because the military chose to protect the protesters in Tahrir Square rather than killing them, and because key international allies pulled support from the Mubarak regime. The attempted revolution in Bahrain failed because the state, with support from foreign allies, was able to mobilize the military to put the insurrection down. This story isn't about cascading network spillovers infecting international politics in chaotic ways, but about the ability of governments to do what is necessary to keep elites on their side. In Libya, the revolution was likely to fail without international intervention. In Egypt, international intervention was almost non-existent. But in each case there are clearly-identifiable actors operating within the network that are having an important effect on outcomes. In at least some cases their behavior may be predictable by either interest-based or ideational approaches.

Perhaps most significantly, to my knowledge there is no evidence that the Arab Spring is an internationalist movement rather than a series of local movements that have arisen somewhat idiosyncratically. Networks played an important role in organizing protesters domestically, but there didn't seem to be any similar network coordinating actors at the regional level, and not all Arab countries have experienced prolonged protest periods. This is what I was referring to above when I said that contagion stories can only take us so far. A contagion story would have to be able to explain why protests spread from Tunisia to Egypt and elsewhere in 2011, but not from Iran in 2009. Or why protests spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Syria but not to Jordan or Lebanon. Or why reforms in Morocco appear to have been accepted by the populace, while they were rejected in Syria. In other words, there appears to be plenty of room for some sort of two-step analysis when determining how, when, and why social movements diffuse through the system.

Which actors are the most important may be a function of network characteristics, but quite often the relative importance of different actors is knowable ex ante. As a critical central node in Egyptian society, no one was surprised when the defection of the Egyptian military tipped the scales in the revolutionaries' favor, and it seems that protesters believed early on that such a defection was likely if the crowds could sustain momentum for awhile. This belief provided just the motivation needed to sustain that momentum. Similarly, if we think about why the US financial crisis led to a global recession while the Swedish crisis in the 1990s did not, we can look to network characteristics of the global financial system and immediately see that the US is a much more important node than Sweden. We could then consult network theory that suggests that in highly unequal systems that are tightly inter-connected, networks are robust to shocks in the periphery but fragile to shocks in the core. Contra Farrell then, having a grasp of how networks behave and what the financial network looks like thus makes even complex phenomena like the financial crisis much easier to understand.

So on a fundamental level I'd argue that Farrell's claim that the international political system is best understood as "space for contagion" is missing something, at least under most common definitions of network contagion which tend to influence structure over agency. For one thing, as an empirical matter "contagion" often doesn't operate in ways we might expect. Revolutions are not viruses. Neither are neoliberal economic reforms or most other policies/outcomes that are often described in terms of diffusion or contagion. I'd rather say that we can use networks to understand the bargaining space within which strategic political actors interact. And if we understand how network dynamics confer power to some actors over others, then outcomes in international politics can be more easily understood.** The pattern of interdependence in networks is thus an important causal variable, but is not determinate on its own. Like Farrell (and Drezner), I do not assume that these interactions are necessarily Pareto-improving, or that they ordinarily will be. Unlike Farrell, I think that the role of states within these networks is likely to be substantial for all definitions of "state".***

Despite all of that, I think Farrell is much more right than wrong in emphasizing the ways in which networks affect international politics in ways not expected by most realist theory. And I think he's right to argue that Slaughter's focus on joint-gains functionalism is misplaced optimism in many cases. But I think the lesson from these corrections is not necessarily that international politics is a space for contagion to spread in unknowable ways, but rather that we need to situate political actors within a structural context to understand how they shape policy and respond to events.

*I'm heavily influenced in this by the research and teaching of UNC prof Graeme Robertson, who has written about and discussed the Arab Spring here and here. His current research is on contentious politics in post-Communist states.

**For one example of this see Charli Carpenter's recent IO article on gatekeepers in advocacy networks.

***In other words, depending on the analysis, we may need to complicate states along lines that Farrell suggests. Sometimes the subtle two-step that Drezner advocates will be fine. As Bear Braumoeller notes in comments to Farrell's post, endogeneity problems quickly emerge when you try to internalize everything into network analyses. Nevertheless Farrell is correct in saying that if we think of world politics as a complex adaptive system (and we should), then problems quickly emerge when we "black-box" any one level of analysis. Unfortunately there's no simple solution for this, but there are ways to gain tractability by shifting focus from one level of analysis to another without completely losing sight of the other levels.