Academic capitalism is a unique hybrid that unites the scientific search for truth and the economic maximization of profits. It turns universities into enterprises competing for capital accumulation and businesses into knowledge producers looking for new findings that can be turned into patents and profitable commodities. To understand what this new institutional setting means for science and the evolution of scientific knowledge, science as a field in a Bourdieusian perspective, which operates in the tension field between autonomy and heteronomy, is explored. On this basis, crucial features of academic capitalism and their impact on science as well as the evolution of scientific knowledge are described. Academic capitalism is located in the zone of the intersection of scientific research, economic profit maximization, and innovation policy. The institutional conflicts of interest involved in the corporate funding of academic research are addressed. The logic of academic capital accumulation is spelled out by describing the entrepreneurial university. Field effects of academic capital accumulation on science, namely increasing inequality, over-investment at the top, and under-investment among the rank and file are examined, along with the organizational effects of academic capital accumulation in terms of tightened managerial quality assurance on diversity and creativity as crucial prerequisites of advancing scientific knowledge. The main results of the analysis are summarized and some guidelines for future research are presented.
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Article
Sanneke Kuipers and Annika Brändström
The post-crisis accountability process is a purification ritual that serves to channel public emotions and enables re-equilibration after a severe disturbance of the sociopolitical order. Crisis accountability literature can be reviewed in terms of forums, actors, and consequences. This setup allows a systematic discussion of how crises impact: the accountability process in influencing its setting (the forum); the strategies of accountees and their opponents (actors); and the resulting outcomes in terms of reputation damage, sanctions, and restoration (consequences). There is a clear distinction between formal and informal accountability forums, with the media being almost exclusively informal, and judicial forums, accident investigators, and political inquiries having formal authority over accountability assessments. Yet, through the presence of formal authorities in media reporting, and because media frames influence the work of formal authorities, the different forums intensively interact in accountability processes. Looking at accountability strategies reveals that the number of actors involved in blame games is likely rising because of increasingly networked crisis responses, and the role of actors has become more important and personal in the crisis aftermath and accountability process. The consequences and success of individual actors in influencing the accountability outcomes is shaped by both institutional settings and individual skills and strategies. A current political power position that exceeds prior mistakes is an effective shield, and denial is the least effective though most commonly used strategy. Accountability processes remain a balancing act between rebuttal and repair. Yet after major crisis, renewal is possible, and post-crisis accountability can play a crucial role therein.
Article
Robert Gregory
Accountability and responsibility are related ideas that are central to political, constitutional, and institutional arrangements in Western liberal democracies. However, political elites in non-democratic systems are generally not held accountable by citizens through such arrangements, and accountability is primarily a means of securing the compliance of state functionaries to the will of these elites. In liberal democracies the terms “accountability” and “responsibility” are often used in common discourse as if they were synonyms, but they are not. The former is a concept that embodies a number of different types, with a common theme of answerability by an accountor to an accountee, usually—but not necessarily—in a hierarchical relationship designed to ensure compliance and control. Responsibility, on the other hand, speaks of the associated but different domain of individual moral choice, where often conflicting duties of obligation are experienced by those in official positions. Beginning in the 1980s, the so-called new public management movement, which brought major changes to many Western systems of public administration, sought to enhance the accountability of public bureaucrats, especially their answerability to their elected political superiors. The effects have been mixed and uncertain, often with unintended consequences, such as the reinforcement of risk aversion and blame shifting and gaming behavior. The quest for accountability is inherently a political process, in which “holding to account” may often depend much less on any forensic determination of specific culpability and much more on evidential and political disputation, where the search for the “truth” is highly—and increasingly—contestable.
Article
George M. Bob-Milliar
Since the early 1990s, African states have been democratizing. Political parties now dominate the public spaces in many African democracies. The past 26 years have witnessed the growth and consolidation of “party democracy” in Africa. This is the longest period of uninterrupted growth of electoral politics in many countries on the continent. Recent Afrobarometer surveys show that almost two-thirds (63%) of Africans support pluralistic politics. Party identification in sub-Saharan Africa has also been on the rise. Across 16 states Afrobarometer surveyed, a majority of Africans (65%) claim they “feel close to” a political party in their country. The mass public who identified with a particular political party increased by 7 percentage points between 2002 and 2015.
Political parties are the vehicles for citizens to engage in party activism. The women and men who join a political party become the party activists. Party activists are the lifeblood of the party organization. And political party activism in sub-Saharan Africa is geared toward the election of the party and its candidates into office. Consequently, party activism is a continuum of high-intensity and low-intensity political activities. Party activists vary in their levels of involvement. Thus, it is a mixture of fanfare and aggressive participation. Political party activism is a multifaceted process where party members undertake any of the following political activities: display a poster, donate money, help with fund-raising, deliver election leaflets, help at a party function, attend party meetings, undertake door-to-door campaigning, and run for party office. The involvement of party members usually varies from active engagement to passive attachment to the party. There were several motives for party activists getting involved in “high-intensity participation.” Because of the crucial role party activists play in the intra- and inter-party competition, the parties provide some incentives to get members commitment. At the organizational level, party activists present themselves for election into party offices at the grassroots, regionally or nationally. They devote their time and financial resources in furtherance of the party agenda. In return, party activists expect the party to reward them with selective incentives when power is won. That said, more research is required at the country level to enable us to construct the profile of the African party activists.
Article
Disproportionate policy response—which is composed of two core concepts, namely policy overreaction and under-reaction—is typically understood to be a lack of “fit” or balance between the costs of a public policy and the benefits deriving from this policy and/or between a policy’s ends and means. The disproportionate policy perspective introduces an intentional component into disproportionate response. It represents a conceptual turn whereby the concepts of policy overreaction and under-reaction are reentering the policy lexicon as types of intentional policy responses that are largely undertaken when political executives are vulnerable to voters. In times of crisis, disproportionate policy responses may be intentionally designed, implemented as planned, and sometimes successful in achieving policy goals and in delivering the political benefits sought by the political executives who design them. The premise underlying this argument is that crises vary in many respects, some of which may incentivize a deliberate crisis response by political executives that is either excessive, or lacking. For example, when crises occur at times of electoral vulnerability, the relevancy of policy instruments’ visibility, theatricality, spectacularity, and popularity may dominate the calculus of crisis management decisions. The same applies in cases where strong negative emotions emerge, and subsequently, political executives may opt to overwhelm hysterical populations cognitively and emotionally, trying to convince them that the policy system is viable.
Article
Muiris MacCarthaigh and Leno Saarniit
Administrative culture is an established and prominent theme in public administration research. It is frequently used to explain or contextualize a variety of phenomena in the discipline, ranging from differences in governing styles and policy outcomes between national bureaucracies to making sense of the informal norms and values that determine the activities of individual public organizations and how they interact with political and non-state interests. It is also occasionally used to characterize a particular “type” of organizational culture, with features that distinguish it from the private or third sectors. With such varied uses of the term, as well as related concepts such as administrative style, tradition, and legacies, administrative culture attracts multiple interpretations as well as its fair share of criticisms as an explanatory tool.
In some contexts, administrative culture is an independent variable that helps explain divergence and variety in policy outcomes within and across national borders, while in others it is a dependent variable that attracts experiments and new measurement tools with the aim of producing more sophisticated understanding of its place in public governance. Early skepticism about the study of administrative culture mainly arose due to the absence of adequate methodology as well as uncertainty about how to begin empirical research into the concept. The emergence of such a methodology and tools for inquiry since the 1970s has meant that administrative culture is now firmly located in the literature and practice of government and a burgeoning literature now exists across the globe. Some of the key contemporary debates around administrative culture concern the interplay between cultures and sub-cultures within bureaucracies, the influence of distinctive administrative traditions and styles on policy outcomes, and the role culture plays in public sector reform.
Article
Louisa Bayerlein and Christoph Knill
There are distinct characteristics to the ways and procedures through which public administrations typically accomplish their daily tasks. The informal routines that characterize the behavior and activities of public administrations in the policymaking process are called administrative styles. They can be understood as the meso-level of organizational culture. Studying administrative styles is important for comparative research on policymaking because they capture and explain variance in policymaking and implementation beyond merely structural aspects or formal institutions. Similar to policy styles and regulatory styles, the concept of administrative styles has long been employed to describe state–society relationships. It has found to be a useful independent variable in the study various phenomena, such as divergent policy developments across European states, national idiosyncrasies in regulatory regimes or the impact of Europeanization on national administrations.
However, administrative styles can also be informative of the relationship between the bureaucracy with both their political masters and society and bureaucratic influence in policymaking. In this regard, one can distinguish two orientations underpinning administrative styles, namely positional and functional orientations characterizing informal bureaucratic routines and standard operating procedures. Depending on the prevalence of positional and functional orientations in behavioral patterns, it is possible to distinguish four ideal-typical administrative styles that apply to administrative routines of influencing the policymaking process: a servant style, an advocacy style, a consolidator style, and an entrepreneurial style. Variation in administrative styles across different organizations can be explained by two factors, namely the internal and external challenges they face. Understood this way, administrative styles could enable a comparative assessment of bureaucratic routines and influence in policymaking across different countries or sectors as well as in supra- and international bureaucracies.
Article
Fabián A. Borges
The last two decades witnessed an unprecedented decline in poverty across the developing world, a decline partly explained by the adoption of social cash transfer programs. Ironically, Latin America, traditionally the world’s most unequal region, has been a global trendsetter in this regard. Beginning in the late 1990s, governments across the region and across the ideological spectrum began adopting conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, which award poor families regular stipends conditional on their children attending school and/or getting regular medical check-ups, and non-contributory pension (NCP) schemes for low-income and/or uncovered seniors.
There is robust evidence that CCT programs achieve their short-term goals of reducing poverty while increasing school attendance and usage of health services. However, they do not improve learning and appear to be failing at their long-term goal of breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Likely as a result of low-quality education, long-term CCT beneficiaries do not have significantly better economic prospects than comparable non-beneficiaries. CCTs also have electoral effects—there is robust evidence from across the region that they increase support for incumbent presidential candidates.
CCTs were a response to the two big transformations the region underwent during the 1980s: the debt crisis and subsequent lost decade and the transition of most countries to democracy. Increased economic insecurity following the crisis and subsequent neoliberal reforms represented both a threat to the survival of newly elected governments and an opportunity for politicians to win over voters through increased social assistance. Pioneered by Mexico and Brazil in the mid-1990s, CCTs were by far the most effective policies to emerge from that context. They quickly diffused across the region, often with support from international financial institutions. Counterintuitively, adoption appears to be unrelated to the ascendance of left-wing governments in the region during the 2000s. The politics of CCT design are less understood. The myriad ways in which design can be conceptualized and measured, combined with the relative newness of this literature, have limited the accumulation of knowledge. It does appear that left-wing governments adopt more expansive CCTs and de-emphasize conditionality enforcement.
Whereas their initial adoption and expansion, which coincided with the 2000s economic boom, proved politically easy, further reductions in poverty will require politically difficult choices, namely, raising taxes and/or redirecting funds away from programs benefiting the better-off. Improving the long-term effectiveness of CCTs will require improving education quality, which in turn will require challenging the region’s powerful teachers’ unions.
Article
Jonathan Pierce and Katherine Hicks
The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was developed to explain policy processes where contentious coalitions of actors seek to translate competing belief systems into public policy. Advocacy coalitions may include interest groups, members of the media, scientists and academics, and government officials that share beliefs about a public issue and coordinate their behavior. These advocacy coalitions engage in various strategies using resources to influence policy change or stasis. As part of this process, advocacy coalition members may learn within and/or across coalitions.
This framework is one of the most prominent and widely applied approaches to explain public policy. While it has been applied hundreds of times, in over 50 different countries, the vast majority of ACF applications have sought to explain domestic policy processes. A reason for the paucity of applications to foreign policy is that some ACF assumptions may not seem congruent to foreign policy issues. For example, the ACF uses a policy subsystem as the unit of analysis that may include a territorial dimension. Yet, the purpose of the territorial dimension is to limit the scope of the study. Therefore, this dimension can be substituted for a government body that has the authority or potential authority to make and implement foreign policy. In addition, the ACF assumes a central role for technical and scientific information in the policy process. Such information makes learning across coalitions more conducive, but the ACF can and should also be applied to normative issues, such as those more common among foreign policy research.
This article introduces the ACF; provides an overview of the framework, including assumptions, key concepts and theories, and transferability of the ACF to foreign policy analysis; and discusses four exemplary applications. In addition, it proposes future research that scholars should explore as part of the nexus of the ACF and foreign policy analysis. In the final analysis, the authors suggest the ACF can and should be applied to foreign policy analysis to better understand the development of advocacy coalitions and how they influence changes and stasis in foreign policy.
Article
Pavlos Vasilopoulos
Affective intelligence theory offers a novel and systematic treatment on the impact of affective reactions on citizens’ information processes and political decisions based on neuroscience. Individuals have two distinct emotional systems that lead to two separate decision-making strategies. On the one hand, the disposition system, governed by enthusiasm and aversion, leads people to rely on habit or their sets of previously learned behaviors. On the other, the surveillance system is activated in novel or threating circumstances and is governed by anxiety. Once activated, anxiety leads individuals to seek for political information, break away from habitual political identifications, and consequently renders them more open to persuasion.
Article
Jonathan Fisher
International Relations theory has tended to overlook the role of Africa and Africans in the international system. Traditionally, the discipline’s most influential theorists have focused instead on relationships between and perspectives of “major powers.” A growing body of work, however, has challenged these more limited efforts to conceptualize African agency in international politics. This scholarship has emphasized the significant space available to, and carved-out by, African states in molding the agendas of international institutions, and the role of African governments and advocacy networks in influencing the trajectory of major international debates around issues such as aid, development, trade, climate change, and migration. The study of African agency in international politics continues to wrestle with two key debates: the meanings of “agency” and “African.” Much of the literature focuses primarily on the role and influence of African states rather than that of African citizens and communities. This focus provides, at best, only a partial and qualified view of the ways in which African agency is secured and exercised at the global level, particularly given the significant structural constraints imposed on Africa by global economic and political inequalities. The extent to which contemporary analysis captures the breadth of African engagement with the international system is also compromised by current state-centric approaches. It is thus necessary to examine a range of approaches adopted by scholars to deepen and nuance the study of African agency in international politics, including work on agenda-setting, mesolevel dynamics and microlevel dynamics.
Article
Christopher Changwe Nshimbi
Africa turned the corner of marginalization in international affairs at the beginning of the 21st century. The end of the Cold War and global shifts in power toward the end of the previous century were closely followed by “Africa rising.” This contrasted previous decades-long narratives of a hopeless, war-ravaged, and plague-ridden continent. The Africa rising mantra followed reforms implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s that improved institutional capacities and established African countries on firm business, economic, and political trajectories. This promised improved business environment, economic vitality, and positive democratic outlook.
Africa has thus become important to major powers. They court it for its support to govern challenges that necessitate international cooperation and to enhance the major powers’ influence in global institutions and on the world. Rising Asian economies such as China and India compete for Africa’s natural resources against traditional global powers like the European Union (EU).
The EU has long been economically and politically involved with Africa and has generally dominated these relations. Leading theories, discussions, and research that examine the historic, economic, and geopolitical factors at play in the evolution of African Union (AU)-EU relations suggest that elements of dependency are a calculated creation of colonialism and encounters that occurred between Africa and Europe before the advent of colonialism. Dependency continues to characterize these relations, as shown by formal AU-EU pacts. Decolonial scholars argue that the dependency is real, as Africa did not demolish colonial structures at independence. Some critical scholars further argue that the history of colonialism is also pertinent to the history of the EU in that the history of European integration was partly influenced by the history of colonialism. That is, the history of colonialism contributed to the political creation of the EU, and attempts by Western European countries to form a pan-European organization coincided with early 20th-century efforts to stabilize colonialism in Africa. The European countries could only efficiently exploit Africa by combining their political and economic capacities.
AU-EU relations face many challenges in the 21st century. Influence in the relations is predominately unidirectional, with the EU determining the terms of engagement even on issues peculiar to Africa or the AU and where the latter appears to have the upper hand. The challenges show that the AU and EU are interdependent, but the onus is on the AU to set priorities right and enhance capabilities for engaging the EU. This would be easier if the EU were not continuously devising ways to maintain its dominance in the “partnership.” An overarching challenge in the partnership, therefore, is finding common ground and leveling the playing field.
Article
Thomas Kwasi Tieku
The African Union (AU), an international organization comprising all 54 independent states in Africa and Western Sahara, was established in May 2001 to, among other things, promote regional integration, interstate solidarity, peace, good governance and to enhance the African voice in the global system. Pan-African organization is like the proverbial forest that has bad trees dotted around its many good trees. The AU has been very successful in addressing the needs of the African political class but it is yet to make a significant difference in the lives of many ordinary Africans. The importance of the pan-African organization to African political elite is such that they would have created it today if it did not already exist. The AU has socialized African leaders to accept liberal values as the foundation of international cooperation in Africa; enhanced the agency of African political class on the world stage; and established progressive and innovative rules and norms for the African continent. It has also created many useful decision-making structures that have contributed to the prevention, management, and resolution of conflicts in Africa.
The AU has, however, been less successful in connecting its activities and programs to many ordinary Africans; providing common public goods and services valued by commoners in Africa; giving voice to the majority of young people in Africa; promoting intra-Africa trade, good governance, and financial independence of the African continent as well as struggled to address the expressed material needs and quotidian concerns of ordinary Africans.
Article
This article examines the rise of Afro-Latin social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It seeks to understand what factors explain the rise of black consciousness and black social movements. Theoretically, it explores the multidimensional nature and meaning of blackness as a social constructions and how such constructions may contribute to or limit Afro-based social movements. Contrary to popular perception, Afro-Latin social movements are not new, but form part of the long history of black resistance in the Americas. Although Black social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean are not new and have long histories like those of Maroon, Quilombo, Cimarròn, and Palenque societies, it is argued that the1970s witnessed an uptick in Afro-referenced social movements across the region. These movements, although in no way monolithic, represented a repertoire of various identities, ideas, and philosophies. Their agendas were framed in the context of racial and social justice demanding social, economic, and cultural rights long denied to them. Theoretically, Afro civil society as a specific Black space and cultural site, is theorized to show how many of these movements emerged. Afro civil society therefore is used to place these movements within a theoretical and historical timeframe.
Article
Jaclyn M. Johnson and Clayton L. Thyne
The devastating Syrian civil war that began after the Arab Spring in 2011 has reminded the international community of the many consequences of civil war. However, this conflict is simply one of many ongoing conflicts around the globe. Civil war has a number of effects on individual lives, the country experiencing the conflict, as well as the international system more broadly.
The humanitarian costs of civil war are steep. Individuals are negatively impacted by civil war in a myriad of ways. Three main areas of research are of interest: mortality, physical and mental trauma, and education. Several factors increase the number of deaths in a civil war, including a lack of democracy, economic downturns, and foreign assistance to combatants. Even if civilians survive conflict, they are likely to endure trauma that affects both mental and physical health. Strong evidence indicates that civil war spreads infectious diseases and severely diminishes life expectancy. Mental health is also likely to suffer in the face of conflict, as individuals often must overcome debilitating trauma. Finally, children are particularly susceptible in civil war settings. Children are often unable to continue their education as a consequence of civil war because combatants often target schools strategically or the state is unable to fund education as a result of funneling resources to the conflict.
Civil wars also pose a number of threats to the state itself. First, a state that has experienced a civil war is much more likely to have another civil war in its future. Conflict recurrence has been explained through the type of settlement that concludes the initial civil war, institutions that may prevent recurrence like proportional representation, and the role of third parties in providing peace-ensuring security guarantees. Beyond recurrence of war, scholars have looked at the impact that civil wars have on state-level institutions, including democratization. While most state-level effects of civil war seem to be deleterious, there may also be positive effects, specifically in terms of female representation. Civil war in sub-Saharan Africa has been shown to increase the number of female representatives, perhaps providing an avenue for gender equality.
Civil wars have ripple effects that impact neighboring countries and the international system more broadly. Proximate states are often challenged with an influx of refugees that may burden social programs or facilitate the spread of diseases and illicit arms. However, positive consequences of hosting refugees may include trading opportunities or economic growth from remittances. Moving beyond proximate states, civil wars have consequences for the entire globe. For example, civil wars have been demonstrated to spur international terrorism. The civil war literature has explored the various effects of conflict at the individual, state, and interstate level.
Article
Jarrod Hayes
For much of the history of the study of international relations, and of foreign policy as a distinctive subfield, scholars have debated the relative weight of agency and structure in shaping the course of international events. Often, the significance of agency versus structure depends on the scope of inquiry. Efforts to identify broad patterns of social interaction tend to play up the significance of structure, while studies of specific events bring agency to the fore. International relations theory is typically associated with the former, and foreign policy analysis (FPA) is more closely linked to the latter. That association suggests that the question of agency versus structure in international outcomes is settled in FPA in favor of agency. An assessment of the literature in FPA shows such a suggestion to be wide of the mark. Not only does FPA struggle with the question of agency versus structure that pervades the study of international relations generally, but also it wrestles with how to reconcile agency and structure in the context of psychological constraints on human cognition. Thus, rather than resolving the debate between agency and structure, the literature on FPA shows that it extends down to the level of individual policymakers. The debate over the role of agency and structure occupies two axes. The first is the engagement of FPA with broader debates over agency and structure in international relations scholarship. The second is the tension between agency and structure in FPA that emerges once psychology is incorporated into the analytical matrix. In both cases, the significance of structure in the actual analysis of foreign policy is far greater than common conception recognizes. This reality means that FPA represents the cutting edge for theoretical and analytical efforts to understand the relationship between structure and agency in international outcomes.
Article
Elizabeth A. Lane and Ryan C. Black
The Supreme Court’s docket consists of thousands of cases each term, with petitioners hoping at least four justices will be compelled to grant review to their case. The decision to move a case from their docket to their calendar for oral arguments and all intermediate steps is what is known as the agenda-setting process. This is a fundamental step in the judicial process, as the Supreme Court cannot establish precedent and affect policy change without first deciding to review.
Article
Thomas A. Birkland and Kathryn L. Schwaeble
Agenda setting is a crucial aspect of the public policy process. Sudden, rare, and harmful events, known as focusing events, can be important influences on the policy process. Such events can reveal current and potential future harms, mobilize people and groups to address the policy failures that may be revealed by such events, and open the “window of opportunity” for intensive policy discussion and potential policy change. But focusing events operate differently at different times and in different policy domains. Although the idea of focusing events is firmly rooted in Kingdon’s “streams approach” to the policy process, focusing events are an important element of most contemporary theories of the policy process. But not every event works as a focusing event. The process by which a focusing event can yield policy change is complex and involves attention to the problems revealed by the event as well as evidence of learning from the event on the part of policymakers. Although focusing events are important, in many ways the concept remains underdeveloped, with few researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of these important events.
Article
Jonathan Klüser and Marco Radojevic
Research on policy agendas and agenda-setting has developed into an important subdiscipline of comparative politics, which seeks to understand how political actors allocate scarce attention. The theoretical origins of the field describe agenda-setting as a “conflict of conflicts,” that is the political struggle over the question of which issues receive attention. Modern scholars have expanded on these ideas and turned them into important theoretical models of the agenda-setting process. The most influential of these models are Kingdon’s multiple streams approach and Baumgartner and Jones’ punctuated equilibrium theory. The former analyses the emergence of issues in the separate streams of policies, politics, and problems, whose coupling is necessary for any issue in order to be considered for political decision-making. In contrast, the latter stresses the importance of negative and positive feedback mechanisms in order to explain long periods of incremental policy change and sudden radical changes, which characterize the policy process.
Inspired by the second approach is the Comparative Agendas Project, which is a comprehensive and comparative data collection effort about policy agendas using a unified taxonomy. These data enable scholars to research the entire political process from media inputs via government throughput to legislative output. Studying governmental agendas, it is paramount to stress that—against common wisdom—political ideology does not play a decisive role in the agenda-setting process. Rather, both leftist and rightist governments seek to portray themselves as potent problem-solvers and respond to problematic societal condition in order to prove their competence. Looking at the media as one potentially powerful political agenda-setter, it turns out that newspapers and television channels’ power to steer the political agenda hinges on a variety of conditions. Generally, media outlets are most successful in setting the agenda if they report on issues that otherwise would not have been brought to the public’s attention. But even then, the media’s role appears to be restricted to narrowing down the issue menu from which politicians can choose when setting their agenda.
The study of political agendas is by no means limited to these areas, as shown by the hundreds of articles that have been published in major political science journals over the past decades. While the agenda approach has not yet developed into a theory of politics, it has certainly become a major subdiscipline of comparative politics, which has helped make sense of the political world.
Article
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla
Agent-based computational modeling (ABM, for short) is a formal and supplementary methodological approach used in international relations (IR) theory and research, based on the general ABM paradigm and computational methodology as applied to IR phenomena. ABM of such phenomena varies according to three fundamental dimensions: scale of organization—spanning foreign policy, international relations, regional systems, and global politics—as well as by geospatial and temporal scales. ABM is part of the broader complexity science paradigm, although ABMs can also be applied without complexity concepts. There have been scores of peer-reviewed publications using ABM to develop IR theory in recent years, based on earlier pioneering work in computational IR that originated in the 1960s that was pre-agent based. Main areas of theory and research using ABM in IR theory include dynamics of polity formation (politogenesis), foreign policy decision making, conflict dynamics, transnational terrorism, and environment impacts such as climate change. Enduring challenges for ABM in IR theory include learning the applicable ABM methodology itself, publishing sufficiently complete models, accumulation of knowledge, evolving new standards and methodology, and the special demands of interdisciplinary research, among others. Besides further development of main themes identified thus far, future research directions include ABM applied to IR in political interaction domains of space and cyber; new integrated models of IR dynamics across domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyber; and world order and long-range models.
