ABSTRACT
Both Benjamin Cohen’s (2007) original essay and Daniel Maliniak and Michael Tierney’s response paper point to important – and for the most part underexplored – questions concerning the ‘American school of international political economy’ and its differences from the kinds of international political economy studied in the UK. Cohen identifies the relationship between ontology and epistemology as key to understanding the American approach to international political economy (and indeed its UK counterpart). In this short article, we examine a slightly different relationship – that between ontology and methodology. We argue that the relationship between the fundamental ontological assumptions of American scholarship on international political economy, and the methodologies that scholars use to test these assumptions is much messier than it might appear at first glance. We explore disjunctures between ontology and methodology in the American school to better understand both the limits of this approach and ways we can counter its blind spots. Tierney and Maliniak’s TRIP data point to a strong elective affinity between, on the one hand, rationalist/liberal ontological assumptions and quantitative methodologies, and on the other, constructivist assumptions and qualitative methodologies. As we argue later, this affinity is not as natural or obvious as it might seem at first glance. It also points to a deeper set of issues for the field. As a variety of philosophers of science have insisted, we need to do much better in thinking about the relationship between our underlying notions of causation and the methodological tools that we employ. By so doing, we will not only be able to better build social-scientific knowledge, but also better help bridge the empirical-normative gap that Cohen identifies. More broadly, we suggest that by combining a more thoughtful approach to causation with a broadly pragmatist approach to the philosophy of science we can both remedy
some of the defects of the American school of international political economy, and provide some pointers to the British school too.
