Jeffrey T. Checkel. 2001. Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change.

Jeffrey T. Checkel. 2001. “Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change.” International Organization 55(3): 553–88.

Dependent variable: Compliance, the extent to which agents abide by and fulfill international rules and norms rather than socialization.

The author focuses on persuasion to operationalize the roles of communication and social interaction implicit but undertheorized in constructivist compliance studies. It also broadens the rationalist compliance approach that focuses on instrumental action and strategic exchange. In some cases, social actors comply by learning new interests through noninstrumental communication and persuasion.

Rationalists

For rationalists, state compliance stems from coercion (sometimes), instrumental calculation (always), and incentives--usually material, but possibly social as well. The choice mechanism is cost/benefit calculations, and the environment is one of strategic interaction in that it is premised on a unilateral calculation of verbal and nonverbal cues.

Constructivists

Many constructivists, especially those drawing from social movements scholarship, see the causal pathway to compliance in a similar way; that is, state compliance is a function of coercion (social sanctioning) and instrumental calculations (strategic social construction). However, a small group of constructivists, as well as cognitive regime theorists and students of the European Union, have suggested an alternative causal pathway, where state compliance results from social learning and deliberation that lead to preference change. In this view, the choice mechanism is non-instrumental, and the environment, to extend the earlier analogy, is one of social interaction between agents, were mutual learning and the discovery of new preferences replace unilateral calculation.

Case Studies

Checkel presents the cases of Germany and Ukraine as examples of norm socialization and persuasion, respectively. His cases suggest three different ways institutions influence the compliance process.

1. Institutional legacies can frustrate the plans of national agents to comply, such as in Ukraine.
2. The structure of domestic institutions seems key in explaining variance in the mechanisms through which compliance occurs. All else equal in German and Ukraine, the insulated nature of Ukrainian institutions increase the likelihood that compliance would be attained through persuasion and learning; likewise, pluralist German institutions made it more likely that social sanctioning would play a more important role in the compliance process.
3. Preexisting norms were key in affecting agent willingness to comply with the injunctions of emerging European understandings. The presence of such cognitive priors hindered compliance (many elites in the German case), whereas their absence promoted it through persuasion and learning (the noviceness of so many agents in Ukraine).

It should be noted, however, that other explanations for the German and Ukrainian experience exist. Checkel does not debunk them.

Jon Elster. 1986. The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory

Jon Elster. “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory.” In Foundations of Social Choice Theory, ed. Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland, 104-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Social Choice Theory

o    Political process is an instrument rather than an end in itself.

o    The decisive political act is a private rather than public action. 

o    The structure is as follows: 

1.      Agents are given so the issue of a normative justification of political boundaries does not arise. 

2.      Agents confront a given set of alternatives so agenda manipulation is not an issue. 

3.      Preferences of agents are given and not subject to change in the course of the political process and those preferences are causally independent of the set of alternatives.                

-         In operation, individual preferences they are purely ordinal, complete, and transitive.

-         Social preference ordering of alternatives should be complete and transitive, Pareto-optimal, depend on only the relevant alternatives, and respect and reflect individual preferences, over and above the condition of Pareto-optimality (anonymity, non-dictatorship, liberalism, strategy-proofness).

Criticism of social choice theory: it embodies a confusion between the kind of behavior that is appropriate in the market place and that which is appropriate in the forum. The consumer is sovereign in the marketplace because he chooses between courses of action that differ only the in the way they affect him; in political choice situations, he is asked to express his preference over states that also differ in the way in which they affect others. A social choice mechanism is capable of resolving market failures that result from unbridled consumer sovereignty, but is hopelessly inadequate at redistributing welfare. The task of politics is not just to eliminate inefficiency, but to create justice--a goal to which the aggregation of political preferences is an incongruous means.

The transformation of public preferences through public and rational discussion:

-         The conceptual impossibility of expressing selfish arguments in a debate about the public good and the psychological difficulty of expressing other-regarding preferences without ultimately coming to acquire them bring about that public discussion tends to promote the common good.

-         Elster objects to this line of argument because not everyone will deliberate, there are time constraints, rational arguments will not align underlying values or eliminate self-interest.

What makes democracy superior are its side effects on economic prosperity. But those side effects can not be what motivate a government to pursue democracy because then society would not believe in democracy on any other ground and the side effects that come with it would not be produced.

The political process is:

1.        instrumental in purpose

2.        an end in itself, a good or even the supreme good for those who participate in it

3.        and/or both

Christian Reus-Smit. 1997. The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions

Christian Reus-Smit, “The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions,” International Organization 51, 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 555-89.

Fundamental institutions are grounded in the underlying normative foundations of international society. Constitutional structures are ensembles of a shared belief about the moral purpose of centralized political organization, an organizing principle of sovereignty, and a norm of pure procedural justice.

States adopt different institutional practices because different norms define the cognitive horizons of institutional architects, thus shaping the institutional architecture, as well as the primary social values institutions are intended to embody.

The modern state principle that social rules should be authored by those subject to them gave rise to multilateral forms of rule determination and the precept that tules should be equally applicable to all subjects warranted the formal codification of contractual international law to ensure the universality and reciprocity of international regulations.