ABSTRACT
Maliniak and Tierney (2009, this issue) report on a survey of IR scholars conducted in the United States (in 2004 and 2006) and Canada (2006 only).1 The TRIP survey was developed for purposes other than adjudicating the debate begun by Cohen; limited to North American scholars of IR, it reflects only indirectly on whether or not a transatlantic divide exists in IPE and, if so, what its contours are. There is undoubtedly selection bias in who responded to the TRIP survey, but we cannot know its direction or magnitude.2 The journals used for the article database are neither comprehensive nor randomly selected, and thus again we would expect some unknown selection bias. Nonetheless, the survey appears to be competently carried out given limits on time and resources and its origins in a study of IR scholars in general rather than IPE scholars in particular. Future improvements promise better and more comprehensive results, but I do not think it is terribly profitable to speculate on what scholars in other countries think or what coding additional journals will reveal until that research is actually completed. Thus, although some (like Randall Germain, 2009, this issue) may be tempted to quarrel with Maliniak and Tierney’s results, their findings should be presumed to be a relatively accurate depiction of IR and IPE as it is now practiced in the United States and Canada. The TRIP results also largely fit my own, more subjective assessment of the field of IPE in the United States. It is undeniable, for instance, that American scholars of IPE have moved increasingly toward formal models and statistical tests over the last decade. The weakness of the TRIP survey, however, is that by focusing on broad existing paradigms and methods for the entire discipline of international relations it channels scholars into established categories for identi-
fying themselves and their work. As would any such survey, it lacks subtlety and focuses more on past than future research programs. The TRIP survey, for instance, does not even include OEP on its list of research programs – and thereby misses the emergence of the most important paradigm in American IPE scholarship.3
