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Citation – Lake, David A., and Robert Powell (eds.), Strategic Choice and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Summary of Argument -­‐ International relations is the study of strategic interaction among actors in the international environment -­‐ The environment is the set of actions and information available to actors -­‐ Strategic Choice -­‐ systematic analysis of the strategic setting becomes the basis for understanding activity relevant to world politics. -­‐ Strategic setting is described by "environments, disaggregated into a set of actions and an informational structure, and actors, decomposed into preferences and beliefs" (12) -­‐ Argues that the strategic choice approach to international relations can both clarify our thinking and advance the research agenda of the field. -­‐ A failure to distinguish preferences from strategic environments hampered much of the earlier IR literature -­‐ The lack of a comprehensive strategic perspective sometimes led political scientists to make misleading distinctions between international and domestic levels of analysis, or to argue fruitlessly about whether institutions matter -­‐ The strategic choice approach calls attention to interactions across levels of analysis because subunits, and transnational actors, interact with central governments of states. -­‐ Its emphasis on the role of informational structures makes it clear that, insofar as international or domestic institutions convey information, they are likely to affect actors' strategies. -­‐ Strategic choice refers to the actors taking into account the expected behavior of others when they make their choices -­‐ Example – Morrow – theories of signaling, commitment, and negotiation have helped researchers improve their understanding of crisis bargaining. o War resulted from misperception of capabilities or resolve. o Yet in empirical work, neither resolve nor the distribution of capabilities correctly predicted either the avoidance of war or which side would prevail. o Game-­‐theoretic analysis then pointed out that resolve is private information, not information available to the other side o Capabilities, insofar as they are visible to other states, are taken into account o What matters for predicting war is not resolve per se (which is unobservable) but the ability of one side to signal its resolve, for example by generating audience costs during crisis bargaining o Capabilities will not be correlated with outcomes as those are taken into account already o Keeping levels of analysis separate is dysfunctional: understanding crisis bargaining requires understanding domestic institutions -­‐ Chapter 7 – Limits of Strategic Choice (Stein) -­‐
o Points out that game theory began as a normative theory to help people who wanted to be rational but found themselves constrained. o "Game-­‐theoretic explanations of choice are inherently problematic in that they make inappropriate assumptions about the capacity of individuals and groups to make rational individual and social choices" (212) o The problem of multiple equilibrium – difficult to arrive at one explanation o Argues that you cannot do without it but it is not enough on its own Methods/Evidence Collection of essays each looking at different aspects of strategic choice Significance to Relevant Literature -­‐
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Questions/Problems/Issues Takes actors preferences as given and fails to understand where they come from Based on relatively rigid assumptions Chapters 4-­‐6 don’t seem to employ strategic choice theory that much Strategic analysis yields important insights into international relations but is not a silver bullet of IR