IO week 1 Flashcards
State
Political community with a permanent population, defined territory, government with a monopoly of force and capacity to enter into relations with other states
Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO)
IO with a membership made up of three or more states; members are states represented by their governments; established by an intergovernmental agreement or treaty; has a permanent secretariat
Examples: UN; World Bank
Transnational Organisation
IO made up of private actors; independent of government involvement (e.g.
transnational corporations, religious movements, NGOs, epistemic communities, social movements)
International Institution
It is used as a synonym for international organizations and regimes BUT also - Set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of IR
International Relations
Structural formal contacts between governments through bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relations
Transgovernmental Relations
Structural informal contacts between (representatives of) ministries, parliaments, and other governmental bodies
Transnational Relations
Structural contacts between private actors across state borders
International regime
International process and collection of rules. Sometimes when formally organized, it can turn into an IGO
Example: When countries come together to sign a collection of rules about managing the Caspian sea. These countries around the sea agree on certain terms and thus create an international regime
Globalization
A process by which sharply lower communication and
transportation costs and fewer barriers to transboundary flows of trade, knowledge, and
people have created more integration among states, markets, people, and technologies
Global governance
The idea behind the term is that states,
international organizations, NGOs, corporations, and a variety of other actors must interact
to help address global problems that no actor can solve alone.
Global governance (Thomas Weiss and Ramesh Thakur)
Global governance (the US National Intelligence Council and EU Institute of Security Studies,)
“The sum of laws, norms, policies,
and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate relations among citizens, society, markets, and the state in the international arena—the wielders and objects of international public power.”
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“the collective
management of common problems at the international level.” Rapid globalization, they
argued, means that problems and threats that states used to be able to manage at the local
level are not only more global but may also be threats to global security and peace.
Behavioralism/Behavioral-ists
Focus on the political behavior of actors and institutions, with an emphasis on verifying testable propositions through quantitative methods.
Integration theory (early scholars) (Ernst Haans)
Interested in how the political processes of integration helped to shape political actors, their interests, and their strategies.
Regime theory
A specific field within the Neoliberal theoretical studies. It defines international regimes as consisting of rules and principles, norms, and decision-making procedures. “Implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules
and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given
area of international relations”
Modified structural realist (Keohane)
Even in the face of (what appeared to be at the
time) a decline in the United States’ role as hegemon, regimes remained viable and useful.
Regimes, according to Keohane, fill a variety of functions, such as providing information,
reducing the cost of bargaining, and increasing opportunities for reciprocity. The result is a
reduction in uncertainty and more occasions for cooperation.
Neoliberal institutionalism
States are still the most powerful actors in this
perspective, IOs are still stages and not actors, but the formal and informal rules found in
formal organizations and regimes help states to define their interests, to make commitments
that are credible, and to monitor one another. IOs enable states to cooperate in the neoliberal institutionalist view, in contrast with the realist assumption that IOs may constrain state behavior.
New institutionalism
Extended well beyond the field of IO, since it was rippling across the social sciences and had interaction between political scientists, economists, sociologists, and organizational theorists.
Rational choice institutionalism
A branch of new institutionalism; Evolved as an effort by scholars to extend and critique neoclassical economic theories; Based on the assumption that individuals are self-interested, rational actors who pursue strategies to maximize their well-being. Their preferences are assumed to be stable and “given” (or exogenous); Interested in how institutional features matter— how they provide a “strategic context” that shapes individual choice.
New institutional economics
A strand of rational choice institutionalism that emerged from the economics field; Responded to neoclassical theories, which treated the firm as a black box, (or a collection of possible production choices) by developing organizational theories to explain why firms behave in particular ways and how they are organized.
Agency theory
A strand of rational choice institutionalism; Premised on the assumption that performance problems within firms naturally arise when one actor (the principal) delegates to another actor (the agent) the authority to act in the former’s interest.
Public choice theory
A strand of rational choice institutionalism; Focuses on how individuals make decisions and interact with one another in different institutional settings; It uses
tools of neoclassical economic analysis to examine political processes
Sociological institutionalism
Interested in how shared systems of rules found in
institutions both structured and constrained actors and influenced their interests; Argued that culturally specific practices influenced institutional forms and procedures
Constructivism (Finnmore and Sikkink)
Interested in the ways that ideas, norms, culture, and other aspects of social life influence politics, issues that had been neglected by liberals and realists; Argue that idea-tional factors are the key in shaping human interaction, that some of these are widely shared, or intersubjective, beliefs, and that these shared beliefs help to shape political actors’ interests and identities.
Historical institutionalism (Paul Pierson)
Defined institutions as including formal organizations and informal rules and procedures that shape
how individuals and “units of the polity and economy” interact; Studied how institutions shaped issues such as health care, organized labor, tax policies, and economic crises; Historical insti-tutionalists were especially interested in the historical processes by which coalitions are formed, policies are packaged,
and institutions functioned
