Constructivism and Comparative Politics

Richard T Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315291079
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This work presents an approach to the study of comparative politics that builds on the assumption that political actors and institutions operate within constructed communities of meaning, which in turn interface with other such communities.

Part I
Theoretical Issues and Overview

1
Constructivist Comparative Politics: Foundations and Framework

Daniel M. Green

A whirlwind of unanticipated global changes and new analytical and metatheoretical developments in the social sciences have brought intellectual crisis and a soul-searching review of approaches, methods, and research questions to comparative politics (CP). These problems have left comparativists in a kind of internal impasse that threatens our identity as a field, its purpose and direction: “[comparative politics … has lost its way.”¹ Divisions, in a field that has always been spread thin to cover the world’s regions and national political systems, may be deeper than ever before. On the one hand, comparativists are proud of their boundless eclecticism in topic and method, and their pragmatic habit of letting daily events dictate their research—a big tent that holds many (Kohli et al. 1995). Yet conversely, this lack of a common ontology and of concern for broader social theoretic debates is also newly criticized, as theoretical infertility and stagnation (Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997). A significant portion of what many comparativists do, often counted as deeply historical and culturally adept “area studies” research, is under attack as both unscientific and unworthy of funding as government and university budgets tighten (Bates 1997; Johnson 1997). This in turn reflects a larger division between context-rich “idiopaths” and generalizing “nomothets.” In this schism a rising “culturalist” trend has given qualitatively-oriented scholars new ammunition against other approaches. Yet others find that the threat from “postie” culturalism equals that of rational choice reductionism, trapping mainstream comparativists in the middle (e.g., Kohli et al. 1995).

The subject matter of mainstream comparative politics is quite familiar, and can be gleaned from the topics in comparative politics texts or from article titles in such leading journals as Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Government and Opposition, and World Politics: formal government institutions and their workings, elections, political parties, publie policies and policy processes, group political conflict, impacts of economic change and political transformation. Much of comparative political analysis has always been problem-driven, tuned to the topic of the day: in the 1990s, concerned with the two major political phenomena of this decade, regime change as democratic transitions/consolidation and the political economy of liberalizing economic reform, in developed (decline of the welfare state) and developing (impact of International Monetary Fund/World Bank neoliberal reforms) countries. These topics are not somehow inappropriate or wrong-headed. But, while articles in the above journals rarely give indication of it, the traditional approaches and assumptions in the study of these topics are under profound challenge today. It is no longer advisable for comparativists to think and write within their tried and true analytic frames. Three challenges to traditional comparative politics are, if not completely novel, more evident and pressing than ever before, creating the opportunity for a new “constructivist” comparative politics.

Challenges to Traditional Comparative Politics

A Globalized World

First, the pace of global economic and sociocultural integration has greatly increased since 1945, and especially in the last two decades, such that the classic unit of comparativist analysis, the insular sovereign state, is no more. Political and economic globalization increasingly challenge the state on several grounds. International market forces have grown stronger than ever, challenging states in policy areas from exchange rates to taxation and fiscal expenditure policies (Cerny 1995). A tremendous expansion in the number and influence of nonstate actors has reduced state privilege and power in international fora. While the state retains a considerable degree of agency in many areas, and is in no danger of disappearing completely, these changes diminish the state’s capacity for autonomous policy making and invalidate old conceptualizations of the insular national polity and the domestic-international boundary (Armstrong 1998; Axford 1995; Jarvis and Paolini 1995; Lyons and Mastanduno 1995; McGrew and Lewis et al. 1992). These changes have also affected “domestic” political identities, patterns of contestation and policy debates, away from left-right class politics to a new identity politics and a new set of issues on national agendas, concerning free trade, protectionism, immigration, minority rights, religious identities, and political decentralization (Cable 1995).

Secondly, one is struck by the increasing synchronicity of political and economic change across polities. Events clustered around 1989 alone are extraordinary, with a wave of countries newly created, dozens of democratic transitions, the sputtering to life of numerous ethnic conflicts and breakdown of several multiethnic states. These are ever more powerful evidence of a global sociopolitical system which, regularly and throughout history, ripples with pulses of change affecting many or all countries at once; as if national polities are in fact cells of a larger entity with a life all its own.²

Both the above realizations have led many international relations scholars to the conclusion that there has been a fundamental system change at the global level, a transition from an international system of interactions between insular states to a world best viewed as a global social system. This social system is ordered and governed by the interactions of states, international organizations, international nongovernmental organizations and numerous networks of communication between them. Order is also provided by the special collectively held principles and standards that guide, prohibit, and render actions appropriate, norms.

For comparativists trying to conduct their research and analysis in this new world, broader systemic processes appear just as significant and relevant to comparativist concerns, if not more so, than the details of national events. What should comparativists do in response? Some suggest a need to rethink the entire “metageography” of comparative politics (Jackson and Nexon, chapter 3 of this volume). Social relations have so transcended local and national spaces that a new paradigm for comparative politics is needed. This book argues that two steps need to be taken. First, comparativists need to take seriously the global environment of supposedly “national” processes, and develop a theorized understanding of it as, for example, one with state-centered polities that are relatively boundless, deeply integrated into many circles of power with authority and political processes at several layers of interaction.³ Second, once they have a grasp of the dynamics of the global sociopolitical system, comparativists need to incorporate it into all their analyses at all points, not as single external shocks but as an ongoing social influence.

An Interpretivist Revolution

Further, there have been very important theoretical developments in the social sciences in recent years, which, for convenience, can be lumped together as interpretivism (a category that includes postmodern, culturalist, and “constructionist” approaches). Interpretivism challenges rationalist methodology and neopositivist epistemology—that is, what we need to look at and what we can find out in analysis. It restates the challenge to positivist notions of an objective, natural world, perhaps appropriate in the natural sciences, but not in the human sciences. Instead, interpretivism insists on the centrality of human interpretation, perception, and cognition to explain any action, and therefore to all analysis in the social sciences, and certainly in mainstream CP.⁴

Interpretivism/culturalism is especially valuable as it offers an improved means of answering one of the quintessential social sciences questions: Where do the reasons, preferences, and interests that inspire action come from? This is problematic for many political scientists, who typically hold preferences to be exogenous, fixed, and probably material (Wildavsky 1987), as in most materialist (political economy, Marxist approaches) and utilitarian (rational choice) accounts of action: Actors always seek material wealth; actors always seek political power. After interpretivism, many argue that rationalism is trumped by the need to first determine preferences and goals, which are contextual and socially constructed (Grenstad and Selle 1995; Wildavsky 1987, 1994).⁵

Interpretivism implies an essential methodological shift in that, to aid in understanding action when we cannot assume interests, new factors or “variables” must be brought in, and assumptions about the nature of old elements questioned. Actors have identities, worldviews, and cognitive frames, informed by culture, that shape perception and interests. While culturalist approaches are not particularly popular in comparative politics today (Ross 1997), there is a growing sense that we must explore the construction of interests, motives, and intentions within complex contexts of cultural codes and norms. The argument is not that rationalist, materialist, and utilitarian motivations are not possible, only that they must not be assumed.

To many, the turn to culture and identity is also a timely and necessary reflection of daily events. Especially since the end of the cold war, polities new and old have suffered through what were once hoped to be bygone atavisms—extreme nationalism, the horrific neologism of “ethnic cleansing,” and genocide (Tilley, chapter 5 of this volume). These are conflicts based not especially on material interests (and suitable to a purely political-economy analysis, perhaps), but a new “identity” politics, challenging analysts to explore the worldviews and mindsets of these actors, to understand action. While attention has centered on ethnic identities, nationalism, and conflict processes, it is also clear that identity in all its senses, given its inherent connection to interests and action, is an essential dimension to any analysis. This also implies that whole swathes of analyses based on assumed “natural” interests must be called into question, revisited, and revised.⁶

A companion of interpretivism’s problematization and contextualization is the notion of “constructionism,” the idea that most sociopolitical phenomena are constructed by human social interaction and the resultant shared understandings of their value and meaning, as opposed to being naturally occurring. Constructionism has cropped up in a variety of areas of study and disciplines (Hacking 1999), and is not necessarily revolutionary to comparativist work, since most things political scientists study—law, money, power, political office, social structures—are socially constructed. The more useful, even liberating, implication of constructionism is that social categories and kinds are not natural or obvious, and need to be questioned (hence constructionism’s critical element).

Finally, within the broad rubric of constructionism lies the specific approach of constructivism that this book is devoted to. Constructivism as defined here combines the “social construction of everything” with a metatheoretical device for understanding the process of construction and theorizing about it, the agent-structure relation. This variety of constructionism has appeared in a new sociological institutionalism, in some of political science’s historical institutionalism, and in constructivist international relations (CIR). While this distinction between constructionism and constructivism does not hold across all disciplines, it communicates the way many constructivists in political science use the term, as incorporating a deliberate sensitivity to the agent-structure problem and debates about the construction process, the co-constitution of agent and structure, more broadly.⁷

New Metatheoretical Sophistication

The challenge posed by interpretivist insights, social constructionism, and other factors has also shaken up many social scientists in terms of what they think and how they think. At an extreme, traditional Enlightenment epistemology is questioned by a new postmodern antifoundationalism, in which truth claims cannot be judged, all theories are stories about an unknowable world, the world of texts, to be deconstructed to reveal the inequities of power and domination. From more centrist positions as well, scholars in many disciplines of the newly reflexive academy have become more familiar with the issues and vocabulary of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of science and adept at attacking the underlying suppositions of rival perspectives. The move to metatheory may not be an enthusiastic one for many, but is increasingly unavoidable, as attacks upon metatheoretical presuppositions can be fatally convincing. (Indeed it has largely been the devastating metatheoretical challenges of constructivism in international relations, for example, that explains the perspective’s overnight ascent in that field [Dessler 1999: 123].)

Comparativists as a whole have dealt with epistemological and metatheoretical debates with caution and a measure of disdain, preferring a pragmatic, problem-driven style (Kohli et al. 1995). We tend to aim for issue-specific “middle-range theory,” based on materialist, instrumentalist logics of action and neopositivist scientific goals that go unexamined. To be sure, comparativists have not shied entirely away from controversies among their core research programs, described as structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist by Lichbach and Zuckerman (1997). These confrontations can be seen in many places in the literature (e.g., Hall 1986; Koelble 1995; Kohli et al. 1995;Pontusson 1995; Taylor 1989; Wildavsky 1987, 1994). But these rarely go deeper. Most comparativists do not bring metatheory, epistemology and ontology into their writing on given topics; hence Lichbach’s anguished “[c]an a discipline mature if no one specializes in its ideas?” (1997: 240, fn2). It is even more accurate to say that when comparativists do venture into such areas, their bibliographies are full largely of noncomparativist citations. Comparative debates on these issues mostly revolve around methods within a neopositivist epistemology, in controversies over, for example, qualitative versus cross-national quantitative approaches, fights against the simplifications of rational choice and formal modeling, and others. These fights assume that the big epistemological questions are answered, when they are not. Above all, there remains little in the way of “CP theory,” in the way that there is such a wealth of “IR theory.”

This situation has prevented comparativists from benefiting from developments such as the agent-structure debate mentioned above. Only very recently and tentatively has CP begun to link itself to this analytic device (Hall and Taylor 1998; Hay and Wincott 1998; Katznelson 1997; Lichbach 1997; Rothstein 1992), one which casts the world in terms of actors and their structured environments and is commonly identified as the central problem in social and political theory. The agent-structure metaphor points to the problem of how actors and their environments affect each other, and to the famous resolution of this issue in the “structurationist” notion of Anthony Giddens that agents and structure must be given equal ontological status, as co-constituted or co-determined, in an interactive process. This metaphor can inform comparativist theorizing and act as a guidepost to theo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Theoretical Issues and Overview
• 1. Constructivist Comparative Politics: Foundations and Framework
• 2. Toward a Constructivist Comparative Politics
• 3. Globalization, the Comparative Method, and Comparing Constructions
• 4. The Socially Constructed Contexts of Comparative Politics*
• Part II: Case Studies
• Index