Author: tompepinsky

Yesterday afternoon, a student asked me in office hours what International Relations Theory has to say about the new Trump administration. There has been some discussion of realism and Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, and some musings about the Trump administration’s implications for different IR paradigms. There is also, obviously, a lot of serious debate about issues of American foreign policy and national interests. Engaged IR scholars such as Elizabeth Saunders, Jeff Colgan, Dan Drezner, and Jessica Weiss (among many others) have contributed significantly to these discussions.

In the interest of adding just a bit of levity to current events, though, here is the answer that I wanted to give her. Try not to be too offended.

Offensive realism – Let’s go ahead and invade Latvia first. Heads up, Latvians.

Defensive realism – Let’s go ahead and fortify Latvia first. Heads up, Latvians.

Classical realism – Plataea sounds kinda like Latvia.

Neoclassical realism – We really need a good way to distinguish empirically between underbalancing and nonbalancing right about now.

Structural realism – If President Trump is not constrained by the international system, then his actions lie outside of the ambit of a Proper Scientific Theory of International Relations.

Liberal IR – Take preferences seriously yes but also take institutions seriously too. Like the Electoral College.

Open Economy Politics – Stolper-Samuelson. Michigan. *mic drop*

Constructivism – See, structure does not determine interests.

Feminist IR – We’ve been warning you about this for some time now.

Queer IR – In a post-fact world, foreign policy statements are neither sincere nor strategic.

Practice theory – Most of what the incoming President does all day is Tweet. We must understand this habitus as constitutive of American foreign policy.

Bureaucratic politics – Um Gottes Willen we hope that we are relevant.

Neoliberal Institutionalism – We’ll second that.

The English School – You know, we’re living in a society.

Environmental IR – We are pretty much f*cked.

Postmodern IR – Da Da Da.

World systems theory – Make America the Core Again!

Dependency theory – Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Postcolonial IR – In othering Putin, you have created him.

Formal Theories of IR – Um, are we forbidden from employing the common priors assumption now?

Democratic Peace Theory – Remain calm. All is well!

Power Transition Theory – China (HT Scott A.W. Brown)

Post-paradigmatic IR – Let’s ask a comparativist.

Nothing is more productive for stale academic debates than a momentous yet unexpected political event. 2016 has seen at least two such events: Brexit and Trump. As a sometime-participant in a stale political debate on ideas versus interests in political economy, these two momentous events have been nothing if not intellectually productive.

My hunch is that the next big conceptual move for political economy is to take identity seriously. The task for political economists now is to integrate identity into our theoretical architectures as a conceptual primitive rather than as a nuisance, a behavioral distraction, or as merely a consequence of something else.

[If you are reading this and pounding the table, saying “I’ve been doing this for years,” please bear with me. I recognize that scholarship on identity and political economy has a long history. I am proposing that we need to do it more, and rather differently.]

What would this look like? Take, for example, the literature about preferences for economic integration. One view holds that people’s preferences are a function of their economic interests: in the simplest Stolper-Samuelson world, low skill workers in advanced economies should oppose trade, and high skill workers should favor it. In a world in which ideas are foundational, individuals favor trade because they have learned (or come to believe in) a cosmopolitan worldview in which trade is good—they possess a causal belief about what trade does. In a world in which identity matters, people oppose trade because they are part of a community that opposes trade.

The first thing to observe about this identity-based explanation is how vacuous it seems. “One does X because one is an X-doer” is infinitely generative claim, but that is because it is nearly tautological. Here is a more pointed way to think about identity in political economy. When people search for information about what they should do, how do they go about it? One view is that they consider costs and benefits, although not necessarily in a materialist or egoistic way. Another view is that they consider their existing beliefs about how the world works, and then try to apply them by analogy. The third is that they look for cues among the beliefs and actions of people whom they consider to be like them. That third possibility is an argument for identity in political economy.

Another example: Why does Spain remain in the Euro? An argument about interests would suspect that it is in the interests of Spain’s leading sectors or a majority of citizens to remain within a monetary union with (most of) the rest of Western Europe. An argument about ideas would imply that the Spanish public and/or Spanish policymakers holds a belief about what leaving the Euro would mean. An argument about identity—one that seems consistent with my own impressions—would hold that being part of the Euro means identifying with a particular European project and aspiring to take part in that. My point is not that this argument is novel; far from it. Rather, my point is that explanations such as this one must be brought in to the “hard core” of political economy, whether it be from the perspective of open economy politics or critical political economy.

The good news is that there are many places to start for integrating identity into political economy. At the individual level, social identity theory is (in my view) among the most productive literatures in the social sciences. At the aggregate level, so-called “constructivist international political economy” has tended to be more interested in ideas than in identity (there are exceptions) but can otherwise offer useful insights. There is a rapidly growing literature on identity and political economy in comparative politics and development economics, although this literature has tended to be more interested in either explaining why identity comes to matter (why nationalism? are ethnic groups “real”?) or on the political and economic consequences of ethnic diversity or polarization. In American politics, racial orders are an obvious place to start, but even something as simple as partisan identity ought to taken seriously by political economists as not just an uninteresting control variable but as a theoretically meaningful explanatory concept.

So what should the road ahead look like? No one seriously believes that identity doesn’t matter at all in politics; the debate should be about when, under what conditions, how much, and in which domains? The first step will be to establish some empirical domain in which identity explains some political economy outcome that neither interests nor ideas can explain. The second and more interesting step will be to integrate ideas, interests, and identity into a coherent theoretical framework. Fortunately, there is good new theoretical work to build on. George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton and Moses Shayo and Sharun Mukand and Dani Rodrik have made essential contributions. The smart money is to follow these leads.

There are some interesting conceptual challenges that political economists working on identity will need to ponder. In a political economy of identity, how one comes to understand one’s own identity is itself interesting. I suspect that one of major conclusions that we will draw from Brexit and Trump is that modern political economies and communication technology are more communally isolating than ever before, making it easier and easier to construct everyday social worlds in which we interact meaningful only with people who are “like us.” Sociology’s perspective on this is homophily in social networks. How do these networks facilitate identification itself, or shape how one understands new information about an in-group? As an exercise, pause for just a moment and ponder just what the concept of a “basket of deplorables” signified in this light.

Another challenge is how to put identity into a causal model? Identities are not fixed or static, but emergent and situational—they can be shaped, they can evolve, and they can themselves be the consequence of identities and interests. One reason why identity has struggled in much political economy is that it is plausibly epiphenomenal on some other deeper thing. I outlined one version of this debate several weeks back, and my own thinking has evolved even from there.

A related issue is the distinctiveness of identity as an explanation. At a recent meeting of the International Political Economy Society, one argument introduced by a colleague is that standard mainstream IPE fared relatively well in explaining the outcome of the 2016 election. Those who stand to lose the most from globalization and deindustrialization voted against the incumbent party. So do we conclude that our existing theoretical architecture “worked”? Or do we include that we must ask different questions, why a particular class of distributional losers understood their interests to be represented in one particular way by a party campaigning using a particular discursive strategy? There are no easy answers. But these are essential questions for knowing whether a research community, in this case IPE, must adapt in response to a momentous political event.

I expect that this issue of identity in political economy will be a major theme in my own work over the coming years (see a preliminary output here [PDF]). I hope to see others take up this task as well.