Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [168]
Owen prefers to employ liberalism rather than democracy as providing the main impetus leading to the absence of war between liberal states. He stresses the importance of the adversary states’ perceptions of each other and employs developmental analysis within each case to show liberalism at work in three types of cases. In the first group of cases he employs a before-after type of research design in which “liberals in state A sometimes shifted from a belligerent to a cooperative attitude with state B when B liberalized internally.”662
In other cases he notes that subjects in state A advocated policies toward B “in violation of their immediate material interest.” In a third group of cases, subjects in state A disagreed over whether B was a threat, and their disagreement reflected judgments about whether B was a liberal state.
In all three types of cases, Owen maintains, one cannot understand state A’s perceptions of state B and the strategies A employed (and thus the crisis outcomes) without understanding the role of ideology.663
Owen places emphasis on how liberalism gives rise to both a foreign policy ideology and political institutions that translate that ideology into policy. He also illustrates the validity of this argument via ten historical cases. In each case, a liberal state, the United States, was in immediate danger of war. Sometimes the war crisis would be with a state that U.S. elites and citizens considered a fellow liberal state. Sometimes the crisis was with a state thought to be despotic, and at other times with a state on which U.S. opinion was deeply divided.
Owen also addresses an important counterargument, which holds that liberal perceptions may be the consequences of other variables, a position taken in recent works by Stephen Walt and Jack Snyder.664 He also takes issue with ideas expressed in early works by Kenneth Waltz and Theodore Lowi.665
This leads Owen to use process-tracing and structured, focused comparison in order to identify causal pathways. Finally, Owen avoids making simplistic or unqualified claims for his theory.666
MICHAEL KREPON AND DAN CALDWELL, EDS., THE POLITICS OF ARMS CONTROL TREATY RATIFICATION. NEW YORK: ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, 1991.
This collaborative study adheres strictly to the procedural requirements of the structured, focused method. The authors note that the politics of treaty ratification of arms control agreements in the United States is a relatively unexplored area compared to the voluminous research and memoirs concerning negotiations of such agreements with other states. They also point out that there have been few theoretically informed analyses of treaty ratification and call attention to Robert Putnam’s observation in his seminal essay on two-level games that a more adequate account of the domestic determinants of foreign policy and international relations must stress domestic as well as political factors.667
The subclass of treaty ratifications chosen for study was limited in several ways. During the past two hundred years, the Senate has approved more than 1,500 treaties, approximately 90 percent of those submitted to it by the president; many others failed because they were withdrawn by the president or because the Senate’s leadership chose not to bring them to a vote when it appeared unlikely they could achieve the two-thirds majority required for approval. Only seventeen treaties were actually rejected by the Senate.668
In selecting cases for the study, the authors decided to focus on treaties that limited weapons in some way and were negotiated in the twentieth century. This still left quite a few candidate cases. To winnow down the list, two additional selection criteria were employed; the cases must