Chapter 2 Outline - Summary World Politics: Interests Interactions Institutions PDF

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Chapter Two: Understanding Interests, Interactions, and Institutions

The Puzzle: What explains the patterns of world politics? Why do interests, interactions, and institutions matter in international relations? Interests: What Do Actors Want from Politics? ● Interests are what actors want to achieve through political action ○ Ex: in international relations we often assume that states have an interest in security - preventing attacks on their territories and citizens ○ Interests are the fundamental building blocks of any political analysis ● Interests are the preferences of actors over the possible outcomes that might result from their political choices. ○ Ex: The United States general interest in security might prefer a democratic Iraq that if friendly toward American allies and encourages the democratization of other states in the Middle East. ● Analysts often group interest into three categories: ○ Power or security ■ All political actors are understood to require a degree of security as a prerequisite to all other goals or to desire power and the ability to dominate others either as part of human nature or as essential to survival in a competitive international environment. ○ Economic or material welfare ■ Political actors are presumed to desire a higher standard of living or quality of life (greater income, more consumable goods and services, or more leisure time) ○ Ideological goals ■ Political actors may also desire moral, religious, or other ideological goals, including democracy, human equality, and dignity, the glory of a particular god, etc. Actors and Interests ● Actors can be either individuals or groups of people with common interests. ● A state is a central authority that has the ability to make and enforce laws, rules, and decision within its territory. ● Sovereignty refers to the expectation that states have legal and political supremacy within their boundaries.

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○ To say that states are sovereign means that they have ultimate authority over their own policies and political processes Anarchy is the absence of a central authority with the ability to make and enforce laws that bind all actors National interests are interests that belong to the state itself, usually security and power The states-as-actors concept serves as a convenient shorthand for sets of national leaders acting in the name of their countries. Interests, interactions, and institutions are necessary for a sufficient explanation of any particular event.

Key Categories of Actors and Interests in World Politics

Interactions: Why Can’t Actors Always Get What They Want? ● Interactions are the ways in which the choices of two or more actors combine to produce political outcomes ○ When outcomes result from an interaction, actors have to anticipate the likely choices of others and take those choices into account when making their own decisions. ● Two assumptions can be made when studying interactions ○ We assume that actors behave with the intention of producing a desired result ○ In cases of strategic interaction, we assume that actors adopt strategies according to what they believe to be the interests and likely actions of others ○ These assumptions link interests to choices and, through the interaction of choices, to outcomes. ● Game theory is a specialized form of theory used to study strategic interactions. Cooperation and Bargaining ● Interactions can be grouped into two broad categories: cooperation and bargaining. ● Cooperation occurs when two or more actors adopt policies that make at least one actor better off without making any other actor worse off. ○ States have the opportunity to cooperate to defend one another from attack, to further a shared interest in free trade or stable monetary relations, to protect the global environment, or to uphold human rights. ○ Pareto frontier represents the possible divisions of the maximum feasible benefit (example on pg. 54) ● Bargaining describes an interaction in which actors must choose outcomes that make on better off at the expense of another ○ Bargaining is sometimes called a zero-sum game because the gains for one side perfectly match the losses of the other. ● Successful cooperation generates gains worth bargaining over and if the actors cannot reach a bargain over the division of gains, they may end up failing to cooperate When Can Actors Cooperate? ● Coordination is a type of cooperative interaction in which actors benefit from all making the same choices and subsequently have no incentive not to comply ● Collaboration is a type of cooperative interaction in which actors have a unilateral incentive to defect ○ Illustrated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma ● A specific type of collaboration problem arises in providing public goods. ○ Public goods are products such as national defense, clean air and water, and the eradication of communicable diseases.

○ Defined by two qualities: ■ If the good is provided to one person, others cannot be excluded from enjoying it as well. ■ If one person consumes or benefits from the public good, the quantity available to others if not diminished. ● Collective action problems are obstacles to cooperation that occur when actors have incentives to collaborate but each acts with the expectation that others will pay the costs of cooperation. ● Free riding is not contributing while benefiting from the efforts of others. Factors that facilitated Cooperation: ● Numbers and relative sizes of actors ○ It is easier for a small number of actors to cooperate and to monitor each other’s behavior for a larger number of actors to do so ● Iteration, linkage, and strategies of reciprocal punishment ○ The incentive to defect or free ride in any given interaction can be overcome if actors expect to be involved in multiple repeated interactions with the same partners. This situation is commonly known as iteration. ○ Actors can prevent one another from cheating by threatening to withhold cooperation in the future. ○ “Good behavior” can be induced today by the fear of losing the benefits tomorrow. ○ Linkage ties cooperation on one policy dimension to cooperation on other dimensions ■ While iteration enables victims to punish cheaters by withholding the gains from future cooperation, linkage enables victims to retaliate by withholding cooperation on other issues. ● Information ○ When actors lack information about the actions taken by another party, cooperation may fail because of uncertainty and misperception. Who Wins and Who Loses in Bargaining? ● Bargaining creates winners and losers: each actor’s gains come at the expense of someone else. ● Power is the ability of Actor A to get Actor B to do something that B would otherwise not do....