IO week 1

Question 1

State

Answer 1

Political community with a permanent population, defined territory, government with a monopoly of force and capacity to enter into relations with other states

Question 2

Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO)

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Transnational Organisation

Answer 3

IO made up of private actors; independent of government involvement (e.g.
transnational corporations, religious movements, NGOs, epistemic communities, social movements)

Question 4

International Institution

Answer 4

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

Question 5

International Relations

Answer 5

Structural formal contacts between governments through bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relations

Question 6

Transgovernmental Relations

Answer 6

Structural informal contacts between (representatives of) ministries, parliaments, and other governmental bodies

Question 7

Transnational Relations

Answer 7

Structural contacts between private actors across state borders

Question 8

International regime

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Globalization

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Global governance

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Global governance (Thomas Weiss and Ramesh Thakur)

Global governance (the US National
Intelligence Council and EU Institute of Security Studies,)

Answer 11

“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.

Question 12

Behavioralism/Behavioral-ists

Answer 12

Focus on the political behavior of actors and institutions, with an emphasis on verifying testable propositions through quantitative methods.

Question 13

Integration theory (early scholars) (Ernst Haans)

Answer 13

Interested in how the political processes of integration helped to shape political actors, their interests, and their strategies.

Question 14

Regime theory

Answer 14

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”

Question 15

Modified structural realist (Keohane)

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Neoliberal institutionalism

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

New institutionalism

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Rational choice institutionalism

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

New institutional economics

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Agency theory

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Public choice theory

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Sociological institutionalism

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Constructivism (Finnmore and Sikkink)

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Historical institutionalism (Paul Pierson)

Answer 24

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

Question 25

Outside in approach

Answer 25

Interested in how politics shape state
behavior toward organizations, why states create and delegate authority to institutions, and
whether institutions have an impact on cooperation among states; assumes IOs are stages or instruments of the powerful, rather than actors in
their own right.

Question 26

Inside out approach

Answer 26

Interested in the IO as an actor and what it does—
that is how organizational structure, bureaucratic politics and culture, and staff expertise
and power may shape the organization’s actions, outcomes, and effectiveness.

Question 27

Regime complex ( Kal Raustiala and David Victor)

Answer 27

“A collective of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical regimes.”

Question 28

Regime clusters (David Fidler)

Answer 28

“Multiple players (that) address specific problems through different processes by applying various principles.”

Question 29

Shifting and shopping

Answer 29

This is a different approach to the idea that when
institutions overlap (or regimes are complex), states can shop around for (or shift to) the
one that best suits their interest. If states are unhappy with how an issue is being played out
in one institution or set of institutions, they may seek to move the issue elsewhere

Question 30

Ernst Haans

Answer 30

Once an integration process was underway, it would also have unintended consequences that would reinforce the process (Spillover)

Question 31

Neorealists/Neorealism and Realists

Answer 31

They view the state as the main unit of analysis in a world characterized by anarchy (in the sense that there is no power above the state) and assume that states seek power in order to ensure their survival; states are the major actors who “set the scene and others must act”; they do not listen to IOs and thus IOs have very little influence on state behavior