How to do social science

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 1:03 PM

There's a terrific article by Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review, entitled "The Costs of Empty Threats: A Penny, not a Pound." Apart from its substantive contributions, it's also a nice illustration of how social science knowledge accumulates and progresses. Indeed, the article is also an excellent reminder of why we need a diverse array of scholars in our business, employing a variety of methods and theoretical perspectives.

In this piece, Snyder and Borghard challenge a well-known argument in the field of IR and foreign policy: namely, the idea that "domestic audience costs" give democratic states certain bargaining advantages in international disputes. The idea originated in a brief comment in one of Thomas Schelling's books, but the seminal treatment is a widely cited 1994 article by Jim Fearon (then at Chicago, now at Stanford). Fearon argued that democratic leaders who issued threats toward an adversary and then backed down risked paying "audience costs" (i.e., their publics would punish them for making the threat and then retreating). By contrast, authoritarian leaders did not face similar audience costs (because they were not accountable to public opinion), so they could retreat without fear of domestic electoral punishment. Paradoxically, this situation could give democratic leaders a bargaining advantage in crises: Because democratic leaders would worry in advance about the dangers of bluffing and then being forced to retreat, they would only issue public threats if they were serious and not going to back down.

Fearon's argument had considerable prima facie plausibility, and the basic idea has been used to explain a variety of international phenomena, including the so-called democratic peace. But Fearon did not provide systematic evidence to support his argument, and subsequen t attempts to conduct empirical tests of the idea have yielded mixed results.

The Snyder/Borghard piece is the most serious attempt to test this conjecture to date. They conducted detailed historical investigations of a series of post-1945 international crises, and in their words, they find "hardly any evidence" that audience costs operate in the manner depicted. Instead:

Audience cost mechanisms are rare because (1) leaders see unambiguously committing threats as imprudent, (2) domestic audiences care more about policy substance than about consistency between the leader's words and deeds, (3) domestic audiences care about their country's reputation for resolve and national honor independent of whether the leader has issued an explicit threat, and (4) authoritarian targets of democratic threats do not perceive audience costs dynamics in the same way that audience costs theorists do.

And for your would-be policymakers out there, their bottom line is well worth emphasizing:

Future leaders of democracies should not come away from their political science classes having gained the impression that democracies can safely get their way in a crisis by publically committing themselves to fight for otherwise unpersuasive objectives.

There's also a broader lesson for the social sciences too. Like all fields of study, social science advances through a process of conjecture, debate, argument, and refinement. Fearon's original article was an important contribution that stimulated lots of creative thinking, and the fact that it may not stand up to careful empirical scrutiny is nothing to regret. We would not know what we now think we know had he not written the original piece (assuming, of course, that Snyder and Borghard's critique stands up to subsequent scrutiny too).

Note further that there was a genuine division of labor involved here, operating over more than a decade. Fearon's original piece was in the rational choice tradition, based on a formal mathematical model and buttressed by some suggestive supporting anecdotes. Snyder and Borghard's article, by contrast, is mostly a careful and sophisticated empirical test using qualitative, "process-tracing" methods, designed to tease out whether "audience costs" played a significant role in key decisions or not. But Snyder and Borghard also identify possible flaws in the original causal logic and identify alternative causal paths to account for the observed results. Thus, neither type of work is either purely "theoretical" or purely "empirical."

For the academy, the moral of this story is that study of international relations would be greatly impoverished if one approach, method, or theoretical perspective came to dominate the field. This would produce an intellectual monoculture where scholars with different strengths were less likely to engage in a productive if competitive interchange, and one where research agendas were set largely by what questions could be studied by the reigning method du jour. In addition to real-world relevance, academic departments ought to prize intellectual, theoretical, and methodological diversity, both because they will be better able to deal with new topics and because different approaches have different strengths and limitations. This is not an argument for an "anything goes" approach to methods; rather, it is an argument against the repeated efforts to impose a single template for what is "good scholarship" on the field.

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EXPLORE:ACADEMIA, AXIS OF UPHEAVAL, DEMOCRACY, DIPLOMACY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, POLITICS

Wanted: A few grown-ups

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Wednesday, August 10, 2011 - 11:40 AM

I have been distracted by personal concerns for the past week, and look what happens. The stock market is on a roller-coaster triggered mostly by political incompetence. There are riots in Great Britain, and large-scale protests are roiling Israel. Syria continues its bloody convulsions, our impulsive war in Libya grinds on, and the euro crisis looks no closer to solution. The United States suffers its single worst day in the long and misguided Afghan campaign. Add it all together, and 2011 is beginning to look like 1968 -- a year that violent upheavals occurred in the United States, France, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. Except that here the troubles are more widespread, more closely connected, and have more potentially far-reaching consequences.

What's most disturbing about all this is the extent to which so many of our current troubles are self-inflicted. It's obvious to any reasonably sane person how to get the U.S. economy back on track, the problem is that there's a dearth of reasonably sane people in positions of responsibility. Some of the seeds of the 2007-08 meltdown were sown during the Clinton administration (as Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make clear in their terrific book Reckless Endangerment), but most of the damage was done by George W. Bush's foolhardy decision to cut taxes, start unnecessary wars, and then fight those wars badly. In short, the United States screwed up big-time between 2000 and 2008. As we all know from our personal lives: when you screw up, you generally have to pay a price.

That means that solving our current problems will not be easy or painless, and we should stop pretending that there's some magic bullet to fire at our current woes. Nonetheless, the basic outlines of what to do are hardly mysterious. We are in a fiscal hole and have a depressed economy, which means we owe lots of people lots of money and aren't generating enough revenues to make people confident that we can get back in the black. We need more revenue, therefore, but we don't want to choke the remaining life out of the U.S. economy.

Accordingly, the best place to get some more revenue is from the wealthiest members of society (who got those big tax cuts from George Bush and made out far better than the rest of America over the past decade or more, and whose consumption won't decline if some loopholes are closed and marginal tax rates rise modestly). I mean, are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett going to lower their thermostats and cancel their summer vacations if we make them pay a bit more?) We also need to trim some entitlements over time, and to cut our bloated defense budget (no matter what new Sec/Def Leon Panetta says). For starters, getting out of Iraq on schedule and out of Afghanistan ASAP would suggest that our leaders really do understand what's truly important and would be a reassuring signal to global markets. In short: a simple combination of entitlement reform, tax reform, and strategic readjustment and we will be on our way to ending the deficit, maintaining our credit rating, and setting the stage for long-term economic recovery.

Except that Washington won't do it. I used to wonder how political paralysis could lead Japan to experience a "lost decade," but we're about to do the same thing if we don't change course. Unfortunately, the GOP is in the hands of leaders who care more about regaining power than they do about the country, and held hostage by know-nothing Tea Party extremists for whom passion is a substitute for reasoning or thought. The White House hasn't helped either: it declared victory too soon on the economic front and thought it could continue "business as usual" in foreign and defense policy, with a better presidential salesman. And for some reason the most gifted presidential "communicator" since Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to take his case to the American people.

What are these people thinking? I scan the political horizon, and I don't see anyone remotely like George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, or even Dean Acheson. We are in the midst of the biggest strategic challenge since the end of World War II, but where is our Kennan or Kissinger? Neither of them were infallible, but each had a genuine strategic vision for the United States, its position in the world, and the actions that needed to be taken to preserve vital interests. And make no mistake: what is needed now is a foreign policy that is based on a clear and hard-headed strategy, one that identifies key priorities, writes off liabilities, and marshals the relevant elements of power to preserve what is vital first and foremost. Instead, we get a foreign policy based on wishful thinking, lofty ideals, or an endless list of global projects offered up by policy wonks and special interest groups, along with more bad advice from the people who got us into our present circumstances. And the latest GOP presidential aspirant -- Governor Rick Perry of Texas -- seems to think that all our problems can be solved if we just pray hard enough. I don't want to tread on anyone's beliefs, but if that isn't a sign of desperation and policy bankruptcy, I don't know what is.

Lord knows that I don't have all the answers, but I used to think that at least a few people in positions of responsibility had a few. But at this point I'm beginning to wonder.

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EXPLORE:FLASH POINTS, AFGHANISTAN, AXIS OF UPHEAVAL, BUSH'S LEGACY, CORRUPTION, DEMOCRACY, DISASTERS, FINANCIAL CRISIS, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, U.S. CONGRESS, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

National security heats up?

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Monday, August 10, 2009 - 6:28 PM

The British statesman Lord Salisbury famously warned that "if you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe."

I was reminded of Salisbury's comment when I read the Times' story on a recent study of the national security implications of climate change. So I went online and read the actual report (by CNA Corporation, a DoD-funded think tank). It concludes that "climate change poses a serious threat to America's national security," describes it as a "threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world," and recommends integrating the national security consequences of climate change into existing defense and national security strategies (along with a number of other measures).

This is a bit of a "dog bites man" story, of course: when was the last time a DoD study concluded that some new global development was leaving us more secure? But as Salisbury cautioned, we need to take such warnings with a "very large admixture of insipid common sense."

If the purpose of the study is to highlight the need to take climate change seriously and to rally public support for doing something about it, then OK. The Times quotes retired general Anthony Zinni in this fashion, where he warns that we will either spend the money now to try to slow or halt climate change, or we will spend the money (and lives) later to deal with the consequences. This is a familiar political tactic: when you want to do something expensive, try to convince people that it is a critical national security imperative. That's one of the ways we got the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, (aka the Interstate Highway System) back in the 1950s: it was justified as a critical element in our national defense infrastructure.

Similarly, there's no question that climate change could affect certain defense operations. For example, rising sea levels could affect access to overseas bases like Diego Garcia, and affect operations at key U.S. naval bases here at home. So there's clearly good reason for DOD to think about these issues and start planning ahead.

But as Matt Yglesias noted yesterday, the CNA study reads like an exercise in threat-inflation (he called it "hubristic imperialism"). It is entirely possible that climate change could provoke major refugee movements in certain areas (e.g., Bangladesh), and that such a development could have powerful effects on neighboring countries (e.g., India). But instead of immediately concluding that American interests are at stake, isn't this first and foremost India's problem? And if the United States starts devoting a lot of time and attention to figuring out how to mitigate such developments, won't that reduce India's incentive to reach a meaningful climate change agreement?

Climate change might also foster instability in various "volatile areas," but it does not immediately follow from that observation that U.S. interests will necessarily be affected in any significant way. Overall, the CNA study illustrates what might be called the Albright Doctrine: "Because we are the indispensable power, every global problem has to have an American solution."

But the more closely you look at the report, the clearer it is that the actual national security implications of climate change are modest, at least for the United States. The likely demands on U.S. military forces will be for humanitarian relief, not for the protection of vital U.S. interests. I have no problem with humanitarian relief, by the way, but let's call it what it is -- a form of global philanthropy -- and not try to sell it as a defense of the American people.

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EXPLORE:AXIS OF UPHEAVAL, DISASTERS, ENVIRONMENT, GLOBAL WARMING, MILITARY

Another "Axis" to grind? The dangers of glibness

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Friday, February 20, 2009 - 5:27 PM

With apologies to my associates here at FP, I find myself in some disagreement with the packaging of the current issue, and especially the special section on the "Axis of Upheaval."

The "axis of evil" was an unfortunate catch-phrase dreamed up in 2002 to scare the American people into supporting a foolish war. Its fatal flaw was the implication three very different regimes -- Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- were somehow in cahoots and should be dealt with in a similar fashion. The result, as readers have surely noticed, was failure on all three fronts.

A term like "axis of upheaval" is likely to mislead us in much the same way. It suggests that there is a high degree of connection, congruence, or coordination between a set of regrettable but largely unrelated problems. Grouping these diverse situations under a single rubric makes them all sound scarier, but that’s not a smart move when they are in fact of widely varying importance. Lumping them under one heading is a sort of glib mental shorthand that makes it harder to identify which problems must be addressed quickly, which can be put off, and which should be ignored.

For the world’s major powers -- and especially the United States -- the central strategic challenge today is figuring out how to allocate finite economic, military, and political resources. Great power rivalries are presently muted, so the big decisions involve minor powers like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, or unstable trouble spots like Pakistan, Somalia or Darfur. In each case, the same question recurs: should we intervene or should we stay out? Making the right call requires focusing on the particular circumstances of each case and the extent to which it actually threatens vital interests. When action is deemed necessary, we also need a strategy that is appropriate for the specific problem at hand. Russia’s situation bears little resemblance to the state of anarchy in Somalia, the drug war in Mexico or the crisis in Gaza, and we are more likely to judge each problem correctly and fashion a smart response if we resist the temptation to see them as part of some broader global trend.

In his introduction, Niall Ferguson suggests that these current troubles share the same features that ignited World War II: ethnic distintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline. This claim makes the situation sound alarming, but the good news is that an even more important ingredient is missing. Today, there are no territorially expansionist and highly risk-acceptant great powers like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, countries that combined significant military power with deeply revisionist ambitions. Ironically, the main revisionist power in recent years has been the United States, which spent the past 15 years expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and then tried to "transform" the Middle East and Persian Gulf by force. Yet even George W. Bush didn't seek to redraw borders the way that Hitler or Tojo did. For the foreseeable future, the danger of a global conflagration is minimal.

Even if today’s instabilities are exacerbated by ethnic competition, financial turmoil and other background conditions, there’s nothing especially novel about the phenomenon of "upheaval." During the 1950s, there were coup d’etats, revolutions, or civil wars in Iran, Korea, Guatemala, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hungary (to name but a few), and subsequent decades witnessed mass killings in Indonesia and Cambodia, revolutions in Libya, Iran and Nicaragua, a "dirty war" in Argentina, a genocide in Rwanda/Burundi, Zimbabwe’s descent into turmoil, and protracted conflicts in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, El Salvador and many other countries. Yet as the Human Security Report Project (and several other studies) have shown, the overall level of global violence is significantly lower today than it has been for most of the past century.

It is also worth remembering that outside powers have at best a mixed record at managing upheavals outside their own borders. Foreign intervention in the French revolution helped trigger two decades of great power war, and Western efforts to suppress the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 backfired too. As Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece on Somalia shows, U.S. interference there has repeatedly made a bad situation worse, because U.S. leaders simply didn’t know what they were doing. Nor should we forget that the complex problems we now face in Central Asia are partly the product of centuries of imperial meddling, a legacy that also complicates the West’s relationship with much of the Middle East. It is hard to believe that more meddling now is going to make things significantly better. The spread of nationalism and the persistence of other forms of local identity eventually destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British, and French empires, and those same forces will confound outsiders’ attempts to impose order on those unhappy societies where instability is now rife.

This is not to say that the international community should simply ignore these various problems or believe that they can always wall them off. But the right course of action is to evaluate each case separately, both to figure out how serious a threat it poses and to fashion a response that has some chance of working. Above all, we need to take a calm and cool-eyed approach to these challenges, so that we focus on the threats that matter most and on the cases where we have a clear strategy for success. Somalia may be the "most dangerous place in the world" to visit, but that doesn't mean it poses the greatest danger to the rest of the world. A phrase like "axis of upheaval" may help sell magazines and give commentators something to talk about, but it is more of an obstacle to our understanding than an aid to it.

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