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0:00
Patrick Theiner: Hey, welcome back to ICEB, my name is Patrick. So this is going to be video number two. And hopefully this is just going to be a little quickie. And what it is designed to do is we will talk a little bit about some of the terminology around theories. Now, why are we doing this? We're doing this because for the first couple of lectures, I will be talking about IR theories. Now, IR theories tend to use specific terminology to describe what's going on: what a theory
0:30
does and what its constituent parts are. And since I didn't want to get bogged down in individual lectures with this, I decided to just make a quick lecture on this, a quick video on this beforehand. So today, we'll talk a little bit about concepts and variables and everything in between. Now, let's take a second and think what IR actually is, what it encompasses. So what is international relations really That you're going to hear about in this class. One popular
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definition is that international politics is politics under anarchy. Now, what that means is that international politics is somehow different from politics that goes on inside the nation state. Now, why is that the case? If you think about a nation state, you always have some sort of pyramid of a hierarchy there. I have a very, I'm in a very limited position of authority over you guys, for example, in that I can tell you what to do on this course. But I have someone running my subject
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area that can tell me what to do. And then we have someone running the school who can - up to a point - tell the guy that's running my subject area what to do. We have a university leadership that tells the schools what to do. And then of course, we have the national level that has all kinds of rules and regulations. By which - by the way - the lower levels are bound to.
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And this is normal in the nation state. This is how things are arranged. There's always someone in charge that has authority to basically make others do certain things or not do other things. And the key observation about the international arena is that that doesn't exist. Now, why does that not exist? It exists because there's a state of anarchy in international politics. And what anarchy means is not so much maybe what you know, your mom or dad could think what anarchy means, which
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is just chaos and disorder. Although there's a little bit of that in there too. What anarchy really is, is two key things. The one is that there is no superior. There is no one that has the legitimate power to tell others what to do. So even though, for example, the US is much bigger than the UK, has a much bigger GDP, many more people, a bigger military and so on. The US can't just come along and tell the UK what to do. The US can't even tell a state like Monaco what to do. And even
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though Monaco is completely insignificant compared to the US, So it means that there is no superior they can tell us what to do. The United Nations can't tell states what to do. The International Criminal Court can't tell states what to do. And that also means that there is no one that orders the relationship between these states. At the nation state level you as an individual, whenever someone breaks the rules, you can appeal to some higher level to punish the rule
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breaker. For example, if someone breaks into your house or someone punches you in the face, you can get the police to come and punish them. On the international level that's not there. There is no superior that can enforce rules.
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And there is something that we call sovereign equality. Like I already pointed out, the reason why the US cannot tell the UK what to do is that both are states, states have equal levels of sovereignty, regardless of how big or how strong they are. So at least at a surface level, Monaco is just as much of a state as the US. And therefore the US can't just come along and tell it what to do. This is again different from the national level. So anarchy really just means that there is
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no legitimate higher level that can enforce rules on the international in the international arena. And at least lots of the thinkers in international relations think that that's the key difference for why IR is different from thinking about nation state politics.
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Now, we can also maybe make this into a slightly broader or possibly, actually, vaguer definition. And then we can just say that, you know, international relations are really all the interactions between states at the international level, or between states and non state actors. And all these interactions have to somehow transcend the national level to matter to us. We don't really care all that much about things that just go on within one state. If this is, you know,
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if you want to ask how British politics works, or German politics works, that's all fine. And that's fine and dandy. But that is not something we look at in IR. And because we are social scientists, we think that while the world might be chaotic, and unordered, we don't think the world is random. So we think that there are patterns in how these interactions between states, and between states and non state actors, work. We think, for example, that there might be rules to why states
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wage war - and I don't mean rules in the sense of a board game. I mean, rules in the sense that sometimes States waged war, and sometimes they don't. And that's not random. France isn't going to go to war against the UK next Tuesday. That's not going to happen. But why are we so sure about that? There is clearly a pattern here. And so once we found a pattern like this - states don't always go to war - once we've found a pattern like this, and we want to explain that that pattern, that
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explanation is what we call a theory. So that's really what links what IR is, with what we're using is explanations and in terms of the theories. Now, one good way I always think of thinking about the international level and thinking about it a little more systematically about the international level and what matters here to us - and maybe also what doesn't matter - is, can be shown in this graph. Now, if you start with a state that has, as we all know, a government and that has a number
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of interest groups, so think - think domestic pressure groups, think Amnesty International, think Greenpeace, think trade unions, think you know societies, you know your swimming society, whatever - anything can be an interest group basically, as long as it wants to influence policy. So and we acknowledge that those two things probably have something to do with policymaking. The government makes the decisions. But oftentimes it doesn't make those
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decisions in isolation. Interest groups have something to do with it. But because we're doing IR and not national level politics, we're not really interested in what goes on inside that bubble, what we're more interested in is that there's more than one bubble. There's more than one state in the world, of course, and they might interact in a variety of ways. So what could that variety of ways be? Now maybe the simplest way of thinking about what IR could be
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is what we call trans governmental politics. It is that governments of different states are interacting in some way. Think of this as Boris Johnson visiting Angela Merkel or a Donald Trump visiting Shinzo Abe, who actually stepped down I think, today or yesterday. So this is governments interacting with each other, they could, you know, sign treaties, they could have negotiations. This could also happen, of course, at lower levels than the top level: it
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doesn't always have to be the prime minister or the Chancellor that's meeting. Oftentimes, this is, you know, lower level bureaucrats, or, you know, the environmental ministers could meet and try to get something going on the environment and so on. So this is all what we call trans governmental politics - government's interacting in a way that transcends their own state borders. We could also think, of course about these interest groups interacting across borders. As we all know
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if there's more than one Amnesty International, there's Amnesty International in the UK. But there's also Amnesty International and lots of other countries. And they can interact. Amnesty UK isn't asking the UK government if it can email or contact Amnesty Germany, they just do that. They might coordinate campaigns, even, they might, you know, transfer funds around, they might move their people, they might coordinate their policies, they might coordinate what
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they're pushing for, at the international level. And these kind of, by the way, they don't necessarily have to just work with each other. They could also work against each other. You could have an interest group in one country trying to pressure an interest group in a different country. Say Greenpeace is pressuring a palm oil producer in a different country to be more sustainable. And all of these interactions we tend to call transnational politics.
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Obviously, states aren't just interacting with each other. They're also interacting with international organizations. I've already mentioned in video one: the EU is one of those, the UN is one of those. And whenever states interact with those international organizations, they are doing something that we call supranational politics. So this is politics that goes on in arenas that lie above the nation state. That doesn't always mean that they have the right to tell nation states what to do. But
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it's clearly something that happens above the national level. So this is supranational politics, when states interact in international or regional organizations or institutions. But then of course, we have a fourth possible level because as we all know, I've already mentioned more than one regional organization. So they could be several international or regional organizations that can then interact with each other, and that is something that we multinational politics. Not sure
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if you're aware of this, but for example, that the European Union is a member of the United Nations. So there is an EU representative sitting in New York at the UN. And sometimes the EU representative is actually the only one that's talking with other countries in negotiations, and the individual EU member states don't even turn up. They just trust that you to do that. And that's what we call multinational politics. So we have four different levels. This comes from Joseph Nye and Lothar
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Brock, this useful kind of graph. We have four levels of multinational politics, supranational politics, transgovernmental politics, and transnational politics. And all of that makes up what we call IR.
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We've said that what really interests us in all these interactions isn't just the interactions themselves, because we're not historians. We're not just interested in saying, you know, in the 1976 the US met the USSR or in 2019, Boris Johnson, met Angela Merkel or something, we are interested in the patterns that this follows. And we've already said that the explanations for patterns, as we call - is what we call theories. So a theory, I always like to say a theory is really just a
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story about how the world works. It's a story about how why things happen the way that they do. So one of the- one example from politics could be that we are observing that wars don't seem to break out randomly. So that's the pattern we're observing. And now we need an explanation for that, why are states sometimes going to war, but other times they are not. If you look at some states in the international system, look at you know, Germany and France, for example, or the UK and
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Iceland, that have never been at war - which is crazy of course, if you think about how many wars there were in history. So we know that wars didn't do not break out randomly. So we need a story about why that is the case. So what we need really is we need a cause and an effect, that are linked through what we call a mechanism. So why could some states be less likely to go to war? Well, maybe we have the idea, "Hmm, maybe it's democracies that are more peaceful, maybe democracies
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don't like going to war." And why could that be then what's the if that's the effect, democracies don't go to war? What's the cause? We can think about this a little bit, but maybe one of the causes is if you are a voter, and you can vote for the person that then has the power to go to war. But if you're a voter, you're also the one that would be most affected by war. Because, for example, you would have to go to war and, and, and, and possibly even be killed. So if those that
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would be most affected by war, have a say in whether or not a country goes to war. Then maybe we would expect those countries to be peaceful. So maybe it's just that voters dislike war. And countries that- were decision making is based on votes, those go to war less. So there's your cause and effect. So maybe that can explain the pattern that we're seeing in why some states go to war more than others. And we then link causes and effects together in something
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called a hypothesis. And a hypothesis is really just kind of a one sentence statement that links a cause and effect. And we've already talked about this. The cause and the effect could here be democracies don't go to war, or maybe, because I think we can all think of a couple of democracies that have no problem going to war. Some even have no problem going to war all the time. Maybe it's just that democracies don't like going to work with each other. They are happy to go to war, maybe with
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other countries that are not democratic. But they don't tend to go to war with each other. And that is an actual IR theory, and it is called the Theory of the Democratic Peace. So that is- our hypothesis is democracies will not go to war with each other, that links a cause and an effect. There's something about democracy that makes states more peaceful. And that then can maybe explain the patterns in the world. Now, maybe you want to pause the video for a second, and I'll
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stay right here, don't worry. And you can think about why it might be that democracies just go to war less with each other, but that democracies have no problem going to war with non-democracies. So think about this. Maybe we have to think about this the other way around even so think about this for a second, you can pause the video and then come back to it in a second.
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Okay, now I want to talk about the constituent elements of hypotheses, these causes and effects that I was talking about because they are also called variables. And we always have two sides of the equation, we always have an outcome that we're interested in. And we have a cause that we're interested in. And we tend to call these by their technical names, and that is dependent and independent variables. So the dependent variable is the thing that we are trying to explain is the
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outcome that we're seeing somewhere in the world. And that we want to explain. So I've given you a couple of, you know, example questions that you might be asking about the world. And let's just look at one here. Say number four, do women make more effective leaders than men? We've all seen in the current pandemic, that there are some countries that seemed to be doing better than others. We had countries like New Zealand, Germany, Finland, all happened to do very well, so far, knock
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on wood. And they also happened to be led by female leaders. So maybe Is there something about women that makes them more effective, primary ministers, presidents, chancellors, and so on. So if we think, for example, for a second about what the outcome is in that question that we're interested in, what would that be for question number four. Actually, a better way would be hit the pause button, go through every single one of these questions and try to see if you can identify the outcome
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in each that we are interested in explaining. So hit pause, and come back here once you've done that.
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Okay, let's see how many you got. So, for example, in the first question here, do perceptions of economic competence influence electoral success? So is it important whether voters think that you are good on the economy? This is something that we hear about the US elections all the time. So in that particular case, electoral success is what we're trying to explain. In Question number four that I just talked about a second ago. would be the effectiveness of leadership.
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Now, mind you, that might still be a little bit vague, right? What is effective leadership? Right? Can we just count covid cases? That means that you're an effective leader? You know, there are other ways of doing that. But we won't get into that the important thing is that we understand that that is the outcome that we're interested in. And then let's come to the other part of the equation. Those are the outcomes that we're interested in. What are the causes that we're interested
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in? So what are the causal factors, the causal factors we call independent variables, so we have dependent variables as the outcome, and we have independent variables as the cause. So pause the video again for a second and think in each of the five questions, which part of that sentence is the cause that we're interested in?
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Okay, let's see if you've got any of those, right. So, again, let's pick question number one and number four. So for the first group It should be relatively clear. It is perception of economic competence, right? That's the causal factor that we think might have an influence on electoral success. It's also fairly clear for question number four, because we know that there must be- or we hypothesize that there is something about a leader's gender, that might have
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to do with their effectiveness. Now two and three might actually been have been a little bit harder. And that is, of course, because their causal factors are left open. They're open questions, essentially, we have no idea in this case, we just know that some countries are democratic. We know that those are not and we're asking why could be any number of reasons. The same goes for question number three. So whenever we build a hypothesis for our theories, we always link
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together causes and effects. And a fancier name of doing that really is just calling them independent and dependent variables, causes and effects. Now, this is the last slide already. I want to emphasize that what we're trying to do in almost all of social science and specifically in political science and even more specifically in IR for the most part is we want to explain patterns. We don't, we're often not really interested in any one particular thing. We want to contextualize that, we want to
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explain the whole picture. And that kind of pattern recognition is what we call a theory. Now, theories have three specific functions. And you might have gathered these already from my previous examples. But the main function that a theory has is a) selection. So theories always tell us not everything about the world is important. You don't need to look at everything at once to understand why things are happening. There are a few key things that will tell you why things happen. So if you
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want to explain wars, you wouldn't have to look at 100 different things. Maybe you just have to look at whether or not states are democratic. So that's good. We want to simplify the world because we can't always perceive it in its full complexity. It has its explanation function. We've talked about this on the past couple of slides, theories link causes and effects together: the democratic says well, voters dislike war. So therefore, if voters have a say over whether or not states
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should go to war, they will probably choose not to. And then lastly, they have a prediction function. Now, you might think that that's a bigger part of the theory than it actually is in reality, but it is a one of the key jobs of a theory, of course, to make predictions about the future. So we don't just want to explain the history of warfare. Ideally, we want to also be able to say something about the coming state of the world. So explaining war in the past 50 years is nice, but maybe
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explaining where we think wars are likely to happen in the next few years, is even more valuable. So that much on the terminology that we're going to be using. We'll- we're going to come back to these kind of terms all the time in the theory lectures. Thanks for your attention and I will see you in the next one.
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