Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field

521 Pages·2002·1.97 MB·English

Progress in International Relations Theory
The BCSIAStudies in International Security book series is edited at the Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government and published by The MIT Press. The series
publishes books on contemporary issues in international security policy, as
well as their conceptual and historical foundations. Topics of particular interest
to the series include the spread of weapons of mass destruction, internal con-
ºict, the international effects of democracy and democratization, and U.S. de-
fense policy.
Acomplete list of BCSIAStudies appears at the back of this volume.
Progress in
International Relations Theory
Appraising the Field

Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, editors

BCSIA Studies in International Security

MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
©2003bytheBelferCenterforScienceandInternationalAffairs
JohnF.KennedySchoolofGovernment,HarvardUniversity
Cambridge,Massachusetts02138
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Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproduced,storedinaretrieval
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tape,mechanical,photocopying,recording,orotherwise—withoutpermissioninwriting
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ThisbookwastypesetinPalatinobyTeresaLawsonandwas
printedandboundintheUnitedStatesofAmerica.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Progressininternationalrelationstheory:appraisingthefield/
ColinElmanandMiriamFendiusElman,eds.
p. c.m—(BCSIAstudiesininternationalsecurity)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0-262-05068-4(hc.:alk.paper)—ISBN0-262-55041-5(pbk.:alk.paper)
1.Internationalrelations—Methodology.I.Elman,Colin.II.Elman,MiriamFendius.
III.Series.
JZ1242.P762003
327.1’01—dc21 2002032170
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Wegreatlyappreciatepermissiontoincludepreviouspublicationsinthefollowingjournals:
Chapters 1 and 2 in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “How Not to Be Lakatos
Intolerant:AppraisingProgressinIRResearch,”InternationalStudiesQuarterly,Vol.46,No.2
(June2002),pp.231–262;Chapter4inJonathanM.DiCiccoandJackS.Levy,“PowerShifts
and Problem Shifts: The Evolution of the Power Transition Program,” Journal of Conºict
Resolution,Vol.43,No.6(December1999),pp.675–704;Chapter5inAndrewMoravcsik,
“Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International
Organization, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 513–553; Jeffrey Legro and Andrew
Moravcsik,“IsAnybodyStillaRealist?”InternationalSecurity,Vol.24,No.2(Fall1999),pp.
5–55; and Chapter 8 in Robert L. Jervis, “Realism, Neoliberalism, and Cooperation:
UnderstandingtheDabate,”InternationalSecurity,Vol.24,No.1(Summer1999),pp.42–63.
On the cover: The Copernican solar system. We gratefully acknowledge permission to
reproducethisillustrationfromtheUniversityofChicagoPress.RedrawnfromWilliamD.
Stahlman from Galileo: Dialogue on the Great World Systems, revised, edited, and
annotated by Giorzio de Santillano, University of Chicago Press, © 1953. We also thank
DonnaWhippleforresearchanddesignassistance.
Contents

Foreword Thoughts about Assaying Theories vii
Kenneth N. Waltz
Acknowledgments xiii
Chapter 1 Introduction: Appraising Progress in 1
International Relations Theory
Colin Elman and
Miriam Fendius Elman
Chapter 2 Lessons from Lakatos 21
Colin Elman and
Miriam Fendius Elman
Part I Applying Lakatos: Judging Theoretical and
Empirical Progress in IR Theory
Chapter 3 Institutional Theory as a 71
Research Program
Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin
Chapter 4 The Power Transition Research Program: 109
A Lakatosian Analysis
Jonathan M. DiCicco and Jack S. Levy
Chapter 5 Liberal International Relations Theory: A 159
Scientific Assessment
Andrew Moravcsik
Chapter 6 A Lakatosian View of the 205
Democratic Peace Research Program
James Lee Ray
Chapter 7 Operational Code Analysis as a Scientific 245
Research Program:
A Cautionary Tale
Stephen G. Walker
Chapter 8 Realism, Neoliberalism, and 277
Cooperation: Understanding the Debate
Robert Jervis
Chapter 9 The Progressiveness of Neoclassical 311
Realism
Randall L. Schweller
Chapter 10 “Is” and “Ought”: Evaluating Empirical 349
Aspects of Normative Research
Jack Snyder
Part II Commentaries on Lakatos, and Beyond
Chapter 11 Explanation and Scientific Progress 381
David Dessler
Chapter 12 Measuring Intra-programmatic Progress 405
Roslyn Simowitz
Chapter 13 Kuhn vs. Lakatos? The Case for Multiple 419
Frames in Appraising IR Theory
John A. Vasquez
Chapter 14 A Lakatosian Reading of Lakatos: What 455
Can We Salvage from the Hard Core?
Andrew Bennett
About the Contributors 495
Index 499
About the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Foreword

Thoughts about Assaying
Theories
Kenneth N. Waltz

S tudents sometimes ask, with a hint of exasperation, why I assign
Lakatos in seminars on international-political theory. One easily thinks
of a number of reasons to omit him: Philosophy of science is a subject
that demands clarity and precision; Lakatos’s prose is opaque and
vague; reading his well-known essay on “Falsification and Research
Programmes” provides no clear guide to the evaluation of theories.1
One certainly is not told just what to do. Yet the answer to why we
should take Lakatos seriously is simple: He demolishes the simplistic
notions about testing that have been and remain part of the intellectual
stock of most students of political science.
How can we assay theories? Karl Popper gave a pleasingly simple
answer. First, make a conjecture, preferably a bold one such as all swans
are white. Then, search for falsifying instances. Thousands or millions of
white swans do not prove that all swans are white, but just one black
swan proves the conjecture false. Simply multiplying observations that
appear to offer confirmation will not do, because one cannot know of
the lurking instance that would defeat the “theory.” Popper’s idea of
the “critical” test rests on a distinction between trying to prove truth
and being able to demonstrate falsity. Popper believed that the latter is
possible; the former, not.

1. Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the
Growth of Knowledge: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy
of Science, London, 1965, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), pp. 91–196.
viii | progress in international relations theory
In 1970, Errol Harris published an insightful but little-known book,
Hypothesis and Perception.2 His title suggested that the results of tests
require interpretation, and his text developed the argument that
seemingly critical tests are at best problematic. Tests attempting to
falsify a theory are conducted against background information that in
its day is taken for granted. How can we know that the background
information is valid? Perhaps the black bird one thought a swan was
really a turkey. That nothing is both empirical and certain is a
proposition established long ago by David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
If the bold conjecture seems to flunk the critical test, the scientist-
observer still has decisions to make about the implications that are to
be drawn from the outcome. Lakatos takes the problem up at this
point. His dictum is that “we cannot prove theories and we cannot disprove
them either.”3 He was right for this reason among others: Facts are no
more independent of theories than theories are independent of facts.
The validity of theories does not depend on facts that are simply given.
Theory and fact are interdependent. As the English astronomer Sir
Arthur Stanley Eddington put it, “We should not put overmuch
confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they
have been confirmed by theory.”4 A moment’s thought reveals the
wisdom of his advice. The earth is the center of the universe, and the
sun and other heavenly bodies swirl around it: These beliefs were
among the “facts” accepted in antiquity and through the Middle Ages.
They were easily “verified” by looking around; they conformed to
everyday experience. From Copernicus onward, however, new
theories changed old facts.
Are these thoughts relevant for today’s political scientists? We have
to believe so when we read the following statement in a widely
consulted manual on the design of social inquiry: “A theory must be
consistent with prior evidence about a research question.” To drive the

2. Errol Harris, Hypothesis and Perception (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
3. Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes,” p. 100 (emphasis in original).
4. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, New Pathways in Science (New York:
Macmillan, 1935), p. 211.
foreword | ix
point home the manual’s authors quote Stanley Lieberson’s
pronouncement that a “theory that ignores existing evidence is an
oxymoron.”5 Ironically, these thoughts are recorded in a chapter titled
“The Science in Social Science.”6 The authors’ science, however, is of the
medieval variety. Theories, they say, may “emerge from detailed
observation, but they should be evaluated with new observations.” In
this positivist perspective, facts are a source of theories and their
arbiters as well. A theory is tested by confronting it with “the hard facts
of empirical reality.”7 Yet seeming facts exist in infinite number. Which
facts are to be taken as providing evidence for or against a theory?
Because of the interdependence of theory and fact, one cannot give a
simple answer. As Goethe put it, “The highest wisdom is to realize that
every fact is already a theory.”8 According to the manual, a theory must
indicate what evidence would show the theory wrong. According to
Lakatos, a theory cannot specify the observations that would over-
throw it.9 According to the manual, there is an asymmetry between
proving something true and proving something false. The latter is
possible; the former, not. Theories are to be tested by trying to falsify
them. Yet according to Lakatos, “some of the most interesting
experiments result ... in confirmation rather than falsification.”10 Steven

5. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry:
Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1994), p. 19.
6. Ibid., chap. 1.
7. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, “The Importance of
Research Design in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89,
No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 475–476.
8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wisdom and Experience, selections by Ludwig
Curtius, trans. and ed. with an introduction by Hermann J. Weigand (New
York: Pantheon, 1949), p. 94.
9. King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 19. Lakatos puts his
point this way: “exactly the most admired scientific theories simply fail to forbid any
observable state of affairs.” Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge, p. 100 (emphasis in original).
10. Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Research Programmes,” p.
115. Harris argues that among natural scientists, falsification is a seldom used