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.

Allan Drazen. 2000. Political Economy in Macroeconomics

Allan Drazen. 2000. "The Time-Consistency Problem" and "Laws, Institutions, and Delegated Authority," in Alan Drazen, Political Economy in Macroeconomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press): 101-165. Chapters 4 and 5.

Chapter 4: This chapter just gives examples of time-inconsistency in policy choices that might arise. They all arise from heterogeneous preferences/conflicts of interests. 

Terms:

1. Time-inconsistency is said to arise if, though nothing has ostensibly changed, the policy chosen for time t+s chosen at time t is different from the policy chosen for time t+s at time t+s. 

I. Introduction

• The puzzle: why does time-inconsistency arise if the fundamental characteristics of the policymaking environment does not appear to have changed?  
• A conflict of interests of some sort is necessary for time inconsistency to arise.
• Time inconsistent policy is interesting when it is chosen to maximized the welfare of those who are misled.

II. A Simple Model of Capital Taxation

• There are two time periods. 
• In the first period:
• The government announces the tax rates it will implement in period two.
• The individual being taxed has an exogenous endowment and chooses consumption level and capital accumulation to be used in the second period
• In the second period:
• The government implements a tax rate on the capital the individual saved in the first period and the labor the individual gives in the second period.
• The individual gets the payoff from government spending and from consumption, which are functions of the capital saved from the first period and the labor the individual supplies in the second period.
• Time-inconsistent solution: the tax policy the government announces for time period 2 while in period 1 is different from the tax policy the government actually implements at time period 2. Occurs whenever ex post capital elasticity is less than the ex ante elasticity.
• In the first period, the government will announce a tax vector with a low rate to encourage capital accumulation.
• In the second period, the government will carry out a tax that is different from the one announced in the first period and there is nothing people can do about it because they can't really change the capital supply anymore.
• Precommitment solution: the tax policy the government would announce in the first period when it has a mechanism to commit to it and not reoptimize in the second period.
• The precommitment solution is the same as the time-consistent solution that results when individuals take government preferences into account when they choose their income allocations and when governments take into account individual preferences into account when they choose their tax policies.

III. Explaining Time-Inconsistency in the Model of Capital Taxation

• People cannot operate for their own good when they are subject to pre-existing constraints or distortions.
• Sequential policymaking is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the possibility of time consistency to arise. 
• What is essential to the phenomenon of time inconsistency is conflict of interests in the second time period (ex post heterogeneity).
• The dependence of utility on aggregate allocations induces a source of conflict among agents, which is crucial for the possibility of a time-inconsistency problem.

IV. A Basic Model of Monetary Policy

• The policymaker chooses optimal inflation taking expected inflation as given. 
• The conflict of interests which lie behind the possibility of time inconsistency:
• Mirroring the capital tax problem, heterogeneity of interests in a representative agent model results in conflict of interests. Each individual wants to minimize the error of his own forecast of future inflation, but would like everyone else to under-predict inflation so that the economy-wide average prediction implies low unemployment.
• Conflict not in the capital tax example: conflict of interests between policymakers with different objectives, reflecting perhaps a conflict of interests between the different constituencies they represent. Conflict occurs when the natural rate of unemployment that the fiscal authority finds optimal is not the same as the natural rate that the monetary authority finds optimal; the fiscal authority has an incentive to increase economic activity and thus drive up short-term inflation.

V. Equilibrium Solutions for All Models

• Optimum is achieved when the policymaker is led at time t+s to carry out the policy announced at t, rather than some other policy, and it is "common knowledge" that he will indeed carry out the policy.

VI. Commitment vs. Flexibility

• There might be gains to ensuring commitment, but in the real world, unforeseen and unforecastable events occur so that the optimal policy at time t+s cannot always be identified at time t. 
• Escape clauses allow for commitment and flexibility.

Chapter 5: This chapter provides solutions to time-inconsistency problems. This chapter concentrates on how the policymaking environment can make policy credible, that is, how institutions or the creation of external circumstances (broadly defined) can lead to the expectation that announced policies will be carried out.

I. Introduction

• When policymaking is viewed as a sequence of decisions, so that the government can reoptimize at every point, the problem of time consistency can be viewed as reflecting changes in incentives over time. Time t decisions lead to an evolution of state variables which give a policymaker the incentive to deviate at time t+s from his previously optimal policy.
• Example: the decision to impose taxes on capital in a time-inconsistent way reflects the accumulation of capital, an accumulation that was induced by the government's previous policies. Hence, with the policymaker's narrowly defined objective function unchanged over time, time inconsistency may be thought of as due to change in the environment brought about by the policymaker himself.
• Time inconsistency can be avoided if a policymaker at time t can choose policy in such a way that state variables at time t+s imply that it is optimal not to deviate at t+s from the previously optimal policy. 
• One way to make current policy credible is by building a reputation by engendering the expectation that certain policies will be followed in the future on the basis of actions that have been observed in the past. 

II. Laws, Constitutions, and Social Contracts

• There are important differences between promises which have no legal backing and laws (including widely accepted norms) in analyzing solutions to the time inconsistency problem.
1. Laws have penalties attached to them so that there are explicit costs to breaking the law. Similarly, social norms have recognized costs associated with not following them.
2. Explicit laws or widely recognized social norms make noncompliance more visible and hence more costly. 
• Since laws make policies credible only to the extent that the penalties which enforce the laws are themselves credible, enhancing credibility depends on choosing the optimum structure of penalties to do this. 
• Laws (and institutions more generally) can enhance credibility by raising the cost and lowering the benefit from deviating from a given policy. 
• Effective commitment follows from the extreme difficulty in changing a law once it is given constitutional status.
• Constitutions can make policy more credible because it does the following:
• Restrict government's use of authority. 
• Set out the basic processes of policymaking—laws about how collective choices should be made.
• Treat issues that are more fundamental than others, such as basic rights of liberties.
• Provide stringent amendment procedures than other laws.
• Unwritten agreements that have force because they are generally agreed upon go by several names: social contracts, social conventions, social norms.
• Social norm - a pattern of behavior that is customary, expected, and self-enforcing. 

III. Delegation of Authority

• Delegation from a principal (the government) to an agent (the agency/authority) might occur for the following reasons:
•  The agent may have greater expertise and experience regarding a policy area.
• Governments are required to handle a large number of issues, each of which may be extremely complex, making it impossible for a single policymaker to make all decisions. The number and complexity of issues makes delegation essential.
• The principal and agent can sign an incentive contract to eliminate agent bias in policy choices and ensure optimal outcomes. The contract institutionalizes the incentives for compliance; the cost of changing an institutional structure is higher than changing a policy in itself.

IV. Fiscal Structures for Time Consistency

• A government can bequeath to its successor government a specific debt structure, such as setting maturing debt in each period equal to tax revenue net of government spending, to eliminate the incentive for its successor to change tax rates and thus try to reduce its debt obligations. 

Richard Price. 1998. Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines

Richard Price. 1998. "Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines." International Organization 52(3): 613-44. 

Price examines the hard case of the role of transnational nonstate actors working through issue networks to affect how states prepare for and wage war in order to demonstrate the influence of international politics on state practices of weapons procurement and military doctrine. He seeks to investigate the processes by which members of a transnational civil society seek to change the security policies of states by generating international norms that shape and redefine state interests. 

• Terms:
1. Civil society - the locale self-consciously identified by both the NGO (nongovernmental organization) community and by governments.
2. Transnational - interactions across national boundaries where at least one actor is a nonstate agent.
3. Transnational civil society - a set of interaction among an imagined community to shape collective life that are not confined to the territorial and institutional spaces of states. 

I. Introduction

• In the 1990s, AP land mines became the object of a transnational campaign because they:
1. hurt primarily populations without adequate emergency care
2. rendered large tracts of land useless
3. burdened economies with disabled survivors
• The effort culminated in the signing of a comprehensive ban treaty by 122 states in December 1997.

II. Issue Generation and Moral Persuasion

• Members of civil society were the primary movers in generating world wide concern about AP land mines when no international legal institutions existed to deal with the issue.
• Civil society's most basic effect was the transnational dissemination of information about the scope of land mine use and its affects to transnational actors.
• Transnational actors then politicized the issue and taught states that land mines were a problem by focusing on the victims and generating and publicly disseminating information to governments and wider society alike; the impetus for action came from outside the state.
• Early steps such as a U.S. export moratorium on AP land mines were used by members of the campaign to challenge others to take leadership measures.
• The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) launched an international media campaign in November 1995 directed at a worldwide ban on the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of all AP land mines in contrast to its usual reputation/role as a neutral humanitarian organization. 
• The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) provided support for national campaigns worldwide; as a direct result of their activities the issue received widespread coverage in the media, even in comic books. 

III. Networks

• Civil society sought to achieve its aims by network with political officials in governments and international organizations. 
• NGOs were allowed to participate in policy debates and interstate negotiations with state officials; they made statements, provided information, and the like.
• An important effect of networking in an issue campaign is that it generates access to the policymaking process by transforming decisions about weapons doctrine from an insulated military matter into a political decision. 
• The global web of electronic media, including telecommunications, fax machines, the Internet and World Wide Web played an unprecedented role in facilitating a global network of concerned supporters around the issue. Telecommunications and hyperlinked networks on the Internet are important in the following respects:
1. They provide a web of surveillance that has not only facilitated widespread awareness of the sources of the problem
2. They greatly facilitate the watchdog role of civil society in grading state and industry compliance with the AP land mine taboo.
3. They create a "space" for politics occupied by a transnational political community--a space other than that bounded by the territory of the state--and, thus, undermine the idea that the international states system is the legitimate arena where politics across borders takes place. 

IV. Grafting

• War and international humanitarian laws set the background against which efforts to ban weapons such as land mines were made intelligible. Two central concepts from these traditions:
• Civilian discrimination / noncombatant immunity - one of the oldest notions of the just war doctrine, it meant that civilians are not to be intentional objects of attack during conflict.
• Unnecessary suffering - the principle that means of warfare that cause superfluous injury are prohibited.
• The ICRC was instrumental in institutionalizing such humanitarian norms of warfare, which legitimized efforts to restrict warfare among states.
• AP land mines transgressed the norm of discrimination because they operate without immediate human intentionality and are indiscriminate in the nature of their effects.
• Proponents of a ban grafted normative justifications from other weapons (chemical and biological weapons) that were already successfully branded taboo onto AP land mines to justify banning land mines.

V. Utility and Reversing the Burden of Proof

• The ICRC commissioned an analysis of the "Military Use and Effectiveness of Anti-personnel Mines", which found that the use of anti-personnel mines never empirically played a major role in determining the outcome of a conflict; they only had a marginal tactical value under certain specific but demanding conditions.
• Questioning the military utility of mines helped to instigate a comparable shift by making mine proponents publicly defend, to domestic and international audiences, what previously required no justification: the assumption that mines have military utility and thus pass the test of military necessity.

VI. Authority and Civil Society

• The transnational campaign challenged and transformed the balance between civil society and the state in the constitution of security. 
• State acceptance of the Ottawa treaty embodies how the issue has been defined: less like a war issue, where change tends to move at a glacial pace and states are reticent to intervene, and more like a humanitarian or health crisis for which norms have developed that legitimize rapid multilateral action.

VII. Conclusion

• The role of moral persuasion and the social pressure arising from identity politics and emulation are particularly crucial.
• Thee impetus for systemic normative change fostered by transnational civil society
• Two widespread processes were stimulated by civil society:
1. Norm adoption through moral entrepreneurship
2. Emulation
• Widespread acceptance of the validity of the AP land mine taboo is indicative of the emergence of a new norm, a status formalized by states signing and ratifying the land mines treaty. 

Robert Putnam. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

Robert Putnam. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapter 6 (“Social Capital and Institutional Success”), particularly pp. 167‐185.

Cooperation amongst individuals requires trust. The trust is social capital that can be lent to individuals within the same social network in order to facilitate collective action. Forms of social capital, such as trust, social norms, and networks, increase with use and diminish with disuse. Personal trust translates into social trust in modern settings through the norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement. Horizontal networks are more conducive to solving collective action problems than vertical networks because subordinates are less able to punish a superior for defection.

Strategic behaviors of individuals are determined by the society in which they operate. Path dependence can produce durable difference in performance between two societies, even when the formal institutions, resources, and individual preferences are similar.

Social context and history condition the effectiveness of institutions. Building social capital is the key to making democracy work.

Miles Kahler. 1998. Rationality in International Relations

Miles Kahler, “Rationality in International Relations,” International Organization 52, 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 919-941.

Rational action is determined by the instrumental pursuit of future outcomes. Rational and nonrational accounts share the same methodological shortcomings in that they aggregate from individual to collectivity. For some, the absence of a theory of beliefs and preferences is a failure of explanation within rational choice models that robs it of predictive power.

Realism was born out of post-war skepticism toward the power of reason. Psychoanalysis was employed to examine decision-making behavior that appeared to violate the canons of rationality by including personality variables, but it is problematic to extrapolate evidence from experimental and clinical settings to the environment of foreign policy and domestic politics. Cognitive psychology finds that preexisting beliefs drives behavior by influencing how new information is processed. Sociological approaches to international relations argue agents, whether individuals or states, are shaped profoundly by a dense institutional environment. Rational institutionalist approach in which foreign policy actions from individual rational actors are constrained by institutions leaves open the question of whether institutions are exogenous or endogenous and when political actors will opt for institutional change rather than change within institutions.

Robert Putnam. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

Robert Putnam. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapter 6 (“Social Capital and Institutional Success”), particularly pp. 167‐185.

Cooperation amongst individuals requires trust. The trust is social capital that can be lent to individuals within the same social network in order to facilitate collective action. Forms of social capital, such as trust, social norms, and networks, increase with use and diminish with disuse. Personal trust translates into social trust in modern settings through the norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement. Horizontal networks are more conducive to solving collective action problems than vertical networks because subordinates are less able to punish a superior for defection.

Strategic behaviors of individuals are determined by the society in which they operate. Path dependence can produce durable difference in performance between two societies, even when the formal institutions, resources, and individual preferences are similar.

Social context and history condition the effectiveness of institutions. Building social capital is the key to making democracy work.

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.