ABSTRACT
In a keynote speech to the inaugural meeting of the International Political Economy Society (IPES) at Princeton University in November 2006, Benjamin Cohen argued that there were at least two distinct schools of thought that have adopted the moniker ‘IPE’ (international political economy) – the ‘British school’ and the ‘American’ school.1 According to Cohen, the intellectual evolution of the IPE field has produced an American school characterized by ‘the twin principles of positivism and empiricism’ and a British school driven by a more explicit normative, interpretive, and ‘ambitious’ agenda (Cohen, 2007: 198-200). These schools diverge in the ontologies, epistemologies and normative stances that each employs to study the same subject – ‘the complex linkages between economic and political activity at the level of international affairs’ (Cohen, 2007: 197). In Cohen’s view, IPE is increasingly fractured along conceptual and geographical lines, yet the American and British schools remain complementary. As such, he ends his reflection on IPE’s transatlantic divide by calling for mutual respect, learning and a ‘meeting of the minds’ (Cohen, 2007: 216-17). Cohen’s speech, subsequent article in this journal (Cohen, 2007), and book (Cohen, 2008) have sparked a vibrant and contentious debate on the origins, character, and even desirability of a transatlantic IPE divide.2 Our reaction was less visceral than most. Nonetheless, we were provoked by Cohen’s depiction of the field and inspired to treat his characterizations of each school, based upon his interpretive intellectual history, as hypotheses that merit further testing. This interest coincided with our ongoing project on Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP): a multi-year study of the international relations field in the United States and Canada. In the TRIP project, we employ data gathered from two extensive surveys of international relations (IR) scholars and a new journal article database that codes all the articles in the 12 leading political science
journals that publish articles in the subfield of IR. Our journal article database covers the years between 1980 and 2006 (see below for note on methodology). While the TRIP project was not designed to provide the definitive test of Cohen’s thesis, it does provide us with some leverage on his claims. More importantly, since the TRIP project utilizes distinctive data collection, coding, and analysis methods – compared to Cohen’s methods – it provides a potentially powerful cross-check on Cohen’s findings about the nature of the IPE subfield and its purported divide. Thus, the purpose of this article is to use the TRIP data to investigate the American IPE school upon which much of Cohen’s argument is premised and from which the lively discussion surrounding the American versus British school has sprung. Ultimately, unlike Cohen, we do not seek to persuade others of the existence of stark differences between IPE scholarship in the United States and Europe. Indeed, our data are limited to IPE scholars in the United States and Canada and to the top journals in the field of IR (as determined by their Garand and Giles impact scores).3 Thus we consciously refrain from making assertions about the nature of the British IPE and the existence or nature of any transatlantic divide.4 Moreover, we remain agnostic about the prospects or desire for transatlantic bridge building within IPE (we leave this debate to others, including those who are contributing to this special issue of RIPE). Yet we are convinced that good bridges require solid foundations; and solid foundations require a clear understanding of the shores on which the foundations are built. Using the TRIP data, we can at least say something systematic about the American shore. We have two specific objectives in this article. The first is to ‘test’ specific hypotheses derived from Cohen’s argument. If Cohen’s depiction of the American IPE school is consistent with the results of our survey and patterns of journal article publications, then his broader thesis about the IPE subfield are further validated and the implications of his argument merit the animated debate that we have already witnessed. If Cohen’s depictions are not consistent with our findings, we should question his underlying assumptions and direct further research into the ‘myth’ of the divide – questioning why some perceive a divide that is non-existent or quite small. Our second objective is to use the TRIP data to assess prominent trends in American – and to a lesser extent Canadian – IPE. The TRIP project is well equipped to do this, insofar as it is quite broad in scope. The survey questions and variables coded in the journal article database capture the essential human and institutional ‘demography’ of the IR field, as well as the paradigmatic, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological orientation of that field. We can parse out variables most relevant to the American IPE subfield. In doing so, we reveal some remarkable and sometimes surprising findings that raise numerous questions directly relevant to understanding the state of IPE in the United States and its place within the broader IR discipline. In this paper, we take particular note of four trends in American IPE: its institutional and human demography, its ‘paradigmatic personality’, the growing methodological homogeneity, and the surprising absence of any ‘ideational turn’ which is so prominent in the other subfields of IR.
