Not so much, argues Phil Arena, whose epistemological leanings are likely very far from my own (via John Sides).
I’m inclined to agree; I also remain unclear if any of the other major subfields of International Relations (IR) can point to the existence of significant settled findings, whether correlative or causal.
This matters, insofar as (some of the) major arguments for demarcating non-behavioral work from “political science” rest upon the putatively cumulative character of statistical and quasi-statistical work.
But what if, rather than producing (non-trivial) settled knowledge, such work largely involves cranking out the n+1th round of data crunching using different techniques, tweaked data sets, or new data sets? Then we have the form of “science” without the content necessary for claims of epistemological priority.
Or, as Patrick argues in his latest book,
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.
Two links suggest themselves:
Tom Lehrer's bitingest song about quant poli sci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI (particularly the line about matrices)
Phil Schrodt's amazing paper from APSA: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1661045
But I am also convinced that there is little we can take away from IR and give to policymakers in terms of empirical findings, as opposed to organized debates. Certainly, it's telling that there are no guns-and-bombs IR folks at the Monkey Cage or in the Sides-o-sphere generally.
Nice read. Thoughts:
1) The democratic-peace debate is, indeed, exhibit A;
2) Hempel is not exactly the final word on prediction/explanation;
3) References to post-modern nihilism shouldn't be tossed around casually in a paper taking people to task for their lack of understanding of philosophy of science; and
4) I'm actually asking an implicit question: is there any reason to believe what is true in Security Studies is less true in IPE or other subfields of IR?
Well, I agree with the implicit question as well, specially given my suspicion that much of the apaprent methodological precision and rigor of IPE over the past 10 or 15 years has come at the expense of asking fundamental questions about the international economic system. (This is why for comps-ing purposes I–and everyone else I know–skipped the question that asked us to analyze the events of the past 18 or 24 months using IPE tools; we simply didn't have any big-think tools at that level–or, rather, none from within the past 20 years.)
Yes, papers like Dreher et al (2008) on the linkage of institutional positions are intereting, but the more interesting such papers become, the less clearly “IPE” they are. But if you asked me to name “one fundamental empirical insight” from IPE, I'd be hard pressed to come up with something that wasn't directly related to testing hypotheses derived from the factoral/sectoral models of trade politics, and that is in some way an insight that both (a) is old (at least Schattschneider 1935) and (b) is not political (e.g., there's a reason why we call them “Ricardo-Viner” and “Stolper-Samuelson”).
Of course, IPE people speak a language that sounds familiar enough to AG and economics people, which gives them an advantage in translating their ideas into popular and elite discourses.
Really? I'd say that the single most successful “translation” is in realist security studies, which has basically become the language of policy discourse.
Dan, while I agree with your conclusions, isn't the question itself a bit outmoded resting as it seems to on a premise of cumulative knowledge and an envy of physics? It would seem to me that if we look at what is shaping security studies it is not the search for significant settled findings on the model of physics but an emphasis on understanding co-evolutionary systems on the model of biology and computer networks which is ascendant. (How else does one explain Canada's latest threat perception outlined in Stephanie's post “Priority Check, eh?” if not by using the logic of network thinking?)
As for the Realist security discourse, hasn't this been challenged at the very heart of the US military machine with the rise of network-centric warfare theorists as scholars like Michael Dillon and others have argued?
(My dissertation was in IPE, so perhaps I am completely off base in my observations of current trends in Security Studies…)
So what's up with the blogging, Nexon … done being an inside policy wonk at DOD, eh?
Good to see you back, in any case …