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Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas, and Progress in Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2004

Mark Blyth
Mark Blyth
Affiliation:
Is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University ([email protected]). He thanks Sheri Berman, Richard Katz, Patrick Jackson, Kate McNamara, and Sven Steinmo for comments on various versions of this article.
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Abstract

This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.

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Articles
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 695 - 706
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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