The Duck of Minerva

Historical Institutionalism and International Relations

by Dan Nexon

15 April 2012, 1900 EDT

[warning: this post and the piece attached to is is only of interest to a handful of academics]

The April 2011 issue of International Organization included a very interesting review essay by Orfeo Fioretos entitled “Historical Institutionalism in International Relations.” The thrust of Fioretos’ argument, developed through a discussion of books ranging from John Ikenberry’s After Victory to Abe Newman’s Protectors of Privacy, is that international-relations scholarship would benefit from an historical-institutionalist turn. Although I found myself in agreement with the broad claims in the piece, I had difficulty with some of its specifics.

Anyone seeking to forward an historical-institutionalist agenda faces a basic problem: the approach doesn’t have what many would consider a coherent core. It emerged, as such, when a few scholars came up with a name for a motley body of work that they saw as distinguished by its opposition to “presentism” and to a rigid adherence to rational-choice theories. In his essay, Fioretos deals with this by, as far as I can tell, deciding that behavioral psychology in general, and prospect theory in particular, supplies historical institutionalism with microfoundations.

This didn’t make much sense to me, as I couldn’t recall seeing this claim advanced from within the ranks of self-proclaimed historical institutionalism. It also got a little under my skin. I’ve always considered my work as, at least, cognate to historical institutionalism and yet I don’t adopt such microfoundations.

The result of my discomfort was a response piece that I shipped off to International Organization. A few weeks ago I received a very nice note from the editors declining to send the piece out for review on the grounds that the issues raised weren’t sufficiently important to merit publication. I don’t have a problem with this, but as journals in our field don’t generally publish responses to articles that appear in other journals, there’s not much left to do with the response. So I’ve decided to make it available here in the hopes that someone will get something useful out of it.

UPDATE: also available, in convenient HTML format, at e-International Relations.

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

13 Comments

  1. Colin Wight
    Colin Wight on 15 April 2012 at 22.45 EDT

    I will look forward o reading this Dan, but I would have thought it could be quite easily knocked up into an article length piece on the use of Historical Institutionalism in IR. If you are interested I can forward some stuff on historical institutionalism from a CR perspective which goes to the issue of micro-foundations.

    • dnexon
      dnexon on 16 April 2012 at 13.25 EDT

      That would be awesome. Thanks, Colin.

  2. Jeppe Mulich
    Jeppe Mulich on 15 April 2012 at 23.34 EDT

    Thanks for sharing this publicly, Dan! 
    I’m very much looking forward to reading it, since I also came away from Fioretos’ article feeling slightly uneasy and quite a bit confused as to the perceived role of historical institutionalism in IR. Behavioral psychology was never something I associated with that theoretical outlook, however motley its origins might be, and it certainly isn’t something that squares off well with historical work (in the disciplinary sense) and the limits perceived therein as inherent to our historical knowledge.

  3. T T
    T T on 16 April 2012 at 13.42 EDT

    Looks to be a good read, Dan, thanks. My memory from the original article’s faded but the mention of prospect theory does not bode well for it. Prospect theory is too often tossed about as an alternative to and critique of expected utility theory when it suffers from the same drawbacks.

    • dnexon
      dnexon on 16 April 2012 at 13.45 EDT

      T T: to be clear, Fioretos doesn’t explicitly invoke prospect theory. This is my reconstruction of what he’s arguing about historical institutionalism’s micrfoundations based on the language and terminology he uses. 

      • T T
        T T on 16 April 2012 at 14.17 EDT

        Thanks for the clarification, Dan. Will have to go back and re-read Fioretos’ piece. On microfoundations: the term itself implies that there is some theory of decision-making at a certain level of analysis, most commonly the individual. Why this is necessary in historical institutionalism eludes me, except perhaps to make it more palatable?

        • dnexon
          dnexon on 16 April 2012 at 15.14 EDT

          Couldn’t agree more.

  4. ADTS
    ADTS on 16 April 2012 at 17.42 EDT

    Dan

    I’m dumb, but I cannot figure out how to access the paper you posted.  I recognize you probably have better things to do with your time, but would appreciate any guidance you could provide as to how to do so.   In the alternative, if you’d prefer, I’d be happy to email in order to receive the paper as an attachment.

    Look forward to reading it.

    Best
    ADTS

      • ADTS
        ADTS on 16 April 2012 at 18.18 EDT

         Success!

        Many thanks.

        Best
        ADTS

  5. Andrew Yeo
    Andrew Yeo on 18 April 2012 at 02.31 EDT

    Thanks for making the paper available which I just read. I also agree that your response could be developed into a standalone piece (although it could have been interesting to see your response together with Fioretos’ reply in IO). On Fioretos, I remember thinking there wasn’t a lot separating rational from historical institutionalism (HI) by focusing on microfoundations.  More could also be said linking constructivism with HI – something I’ve thought about writing on: once norms/ideas become “embedded” and institutionalized they are difficult to reverse and become manifest in other areas of policy-making. Anyway Fioretos organized an APSA panel on historical institutionalism which I’m on if you’re interested. My piece is more on the application of HI in IR rather than its theory (trying to
    use HI to explain Northeast Asia’s institutional architecture)

    • dnexon
      dnexon on 18 April 2012 at 02.59 EDT

      Andrew: won’t be at APSA, but you should send me your paper. I agree with you about a lot of constructivist studies (but not all) fitting comfortably within an historical-institutionalist framework. There are a lot of us who clearly aren’t doing “world polity theory,” who many would describe as constructivists, and yet are doing scholarship that looks an awful lot like what one find in historical institutionalism. Heck, Peter Katzenstein routinely gets invoked as writing some of the foundational work for historical institutionalism, but you wouldn’t know that from the review essay.

      I obviously think that you are right about the rational-choice issue. And it isn’t just the blind alley of describing the approach in terms of distinctive microfoundations, but also providing an account of said microfoundations which departs only at the margins from expected-utility theory.

      Anyway, I sent Orfeo a “heads up” (seemed like the decent thing to do) about the piece and its reproduction in e-international relations. He’s hasn’t replied, let alone tell me if he wants to post a reply. I’m hoping he does.

  6. Joey
    Joey on 26 April 2012 at 14.25 EDT

    Thank you for making this response available.  Your experience with the IO editors is just another demonstration that the original intellectual purpose of journals, to disseminate research, has been usurped by the need to lazily measure “quality” of researchers for career advancement.  Reactions to and critiques of articles published, especially when they are as ripe for critique as this Fioretos piece, are clearly important enough to merit consideration by those interested in the original article.