Chapter Six: Domestic Politics and International Interactions: The Central Units of Analysis

Study

Chapter Summary

States have not always been the primary units for analyzing international affairs. Indeed, the strategic perspective argues that states are not the central units that we should study now. International systems without states have existed, and unit behavior in a state system differs from these systems primarily because states have a territorial basis. Structural perspectives that focus solely on state behavior do not predict well in the eras when the international system was not organized into states. In addition, structural theories do not explain well now since they ignore domestic politics. The examples of Soviet domestic politics and coalition formation, and of the 1992 presidential election had the United States used a proportional representation electoral system, show how this might be the case.

Study Questions

• Are states still the central units--if not the central actors--of international relations? What other actors might replace states? How would the addition of nonstate actors to a territorial state-based system affect our notion of sovereignty?
  
  

• Think about the arrangement of Russian/Soviet domestic actors shown in the chapter. What might the Soviet policy outcome have looked like (relative to the actual outcome) had Yeltsin been a little less dovish (more hawkish) in his foreign policy?
  
  
  
• Why was a Ligachev-Yeltsin coalition unlikely, even though a win set existed between them?
  
  
  
• Are all win sets equally likely to contain the policy outcome? Consider your answers to the two previous questions.
  
  
  
• All of the actors presented here have circular indifference curves. Drawing on the discussion of indifference curves in Chapter 5, what might noncircular indifference curves imply about an actor's preferences?
  
  
  
• Why are actors willing to accept an agreement in the regions we call win sets? What is special about those sets of points?
  
  
  
• How are power and perceptions incorporated into spatial models?