Foundations: the Great Debates

Keohane (2009) · Political Science as a Vocation

PS: Political Science & Politics · the discipline, the vocation, and the puzzle-centric approach

Keohane gives a broad definition of political science. Politics is the effort to organize human groups, set internal rules, and compete or cooperate with other organized groups outside. Science is a public set of procedures for making and judging descriptive and causal inferences, with methods open to public evaluation and conclusions open to revision. IR is the part of this wider enterprise that studies politics across borders. To be a researcher is therefore not just to have opinions about world affairs. It is to ask questions that others can check, define concepts clearly, make careful descriptions and causal claims, teach in plain language, and choose important problems while still seeking objectivity. A puzzle-centric approach begins with an anomaly. We notice that what we observe does not fit what an established theory led us to expect. Keohane’s point is that good work often starts when someone sees a puzzle where others see a fact, and even a simple question can expose a weak premise. We uncover puzzles by comparing expectations with evidence, by asking whether our concepts are stretched, and by listening to questions that first seem naive. For me, two puzzles run through the course: why cooperation is so hard even when it would help all sides, and why the same event can look convincing at the individual, domestic, and system levels at once.

IR is a subfield of political science, but it has porous borders because it studies war, trade, institutions, law, psychology, history, and political economy at the same time. Keohane’s own lecture shows both the strength and the limits of the field: it has a rich history, but many of his examples come from Europe and the United States, and he says the discipline has been heavily American and partly European. Methodologically, I would not call the field simply quantitative or qualitative. Keohane rejects a narrow view of science as only mathematics or experiments; numbers can help if they are reliable and valid, but interpretation, conceptual clarity, and counterfactual causal reasoning remain central. The field feels alive, but its future depends on becoming less parochial and more open while keeping a serious culture of evidence.

Jervis (2016) · Theories of International Relations

In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations · paradigms and the levels-of-analysis framework

The framework asks where the main cause is located. Jervis follows Waltz’s three images: the first image looks to human nature, leaders, perception, and cognition; the second looks to the state, such as regime type, domestic interests, and institutions; the third looks to the international system, especially anarchy and polarity. It complicates IR because the same event can be explained at more than one level. The Iraq War, for example, can be read through Bush’s beliefs, American political culture and political economy, or the behavior of a powerful state in a permissive system. The framework is useful because it forces comparison and makes causal claims explicit. But it also warns us not to select only cases where the outcome happened, and not to forget selection effects, time, and interaction among cases. Jervis organizes the field around realism, liberalism, and social constructivism. Realism treats states as the usual main actors and puts power, security, national interest, and the danger of anarchy at the center. Its family includes classical realists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Carr, Morgenthau, and Wolfers; neoclassical realism; defensive and offensive realism; and Waltz’s structural realism. Liberalism locates interests inside society and domestic institutions. It includes arguments about trade, democratic peace, audience costs, and neoliberal institutionalism, especially Keohane’s claim that institutions can lower transaction costs, create information, and support cooperation. Constructivism argues that identities, interests, norms, and even concepts such as sovereignty are socially made through interaction. Jervis links this line to Hedley Bull, Richard Ashley, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein. Lake adds a meta-point: these paradigms matter, but the field makes more progress when it treats them as tools rather than creeds.

Lake (2013) · Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory

European Journal of International Relations · against the paradigm wars, toward eclecticism

Lake presents the Great Debates as the standard story IR tells about itself, but he is skeptical of how neat that story is. The first debate is usually described as idealists versus realists around World War II, the second as traditionalists versus behaviorists in the 1960s, and the later debate or debates as realism, liberalism, radicalism, neorealism, neoliberalism, constructivism, and then positivists versus reflectivists. His point is not that nothing happened. It is that the debates did not resolve much, often continued under new names, and were later retold as cleaner battles than they really were. They clarified assumptions, but they also turned inquiry into loyalty to an ism. Theoretical paradigms are broad families of assumptions, such as realism, liberalism, or constructivism. They ask very large questions about what kind of world politics is. Mid-level theory is more modest and more useful for research. It starts from a concrete problem, states its scope, combines ideas from different traditions when needed, and judges success by whether it explains facts and generates new testable claims. Lake’s examples are open economy politics and democratic peace theory. Neither fits neatly into one paradigm, but both produced cumulative research. This is why he prefers eclectic, problem-driven theory to paradigm war.

Positivists, in Lake’s account, are not simply people who use statistics. They share a broad commitment to social science, observable implications, and causal inference; they usually treat actors as intentional and calculating. Post-positivists are more diverse. They reject the idea that objective science should be limited to observable facts, and many focus on interpretation, hidden social power, ethics, and change. Lake sees the divide as real, but he does not want another Great Debate because it would likely be inconclusive. I agree with the caution. The key is not to force one side to win, but to ask each approach to state its standards clearly and then use it where it helps us see the problem better. What should die is not theory itself, but grand-theory tribalism. Lake is attacking the habit of saying “as a realist” or “as a liberal” as if that settled the argument. What lives is theory in the plural: mid-level, eclectic, problem-driven theory that can travel across methods and build knowledge over time. So the title is deliberately double. “Theory is dead” if theory means the old paradigm wars. “Long live theory” if theory means precise concepts, mechanisms, scope conditions, and testable claims about real problems.

Desch (2019) · How Political Science Became Irrelevant

The Chronicle · the policy-relevance gap and the cost of professionalization

Desch’s main argument is that political science, including IR, has become less useful to policy because the profession increasingly rewards rigor as technique and not relevance as public value. He does not say that rigor is bad. His complaint is that scholars often equate rigor with statistics, formal models, and narrow method, even when the question needs history, area knowledge, and qualitative judgment. Professionalization deepens the problem: specialization, peer review, jargon, the wish for autonomy, and a value-free idea of objectivity all push scholars away from the policy world. I find the diagnosis partly persuasive. The danger is real when method chooses the question rather than the question choosing the method. But relevance also has risks, which Barma and Goldgeier make clearer. Desch argues that political science increasingly imitates economics and the natural sciences by treating mathematical and formal tools as the highest sign of science. The gain is clarity, explicit assumptions, and sometimes stronger causal inference. The loss is that many urgent policy questions are not well served by those tools. Policymakers often need case knowledge, historical comparison, institutional detail, and judgment under uncertainty, while the field tends to produce narrow work written for other specialists. My own view is not that quantitative or formal work is the enemy. The problem is method worship. A model should clarify a substantive question, not replace it.

For Desch, policy relevance means that scholarship helps people think about and make policy decisions. He thinks the field should care about this for three reasons: society needs academic perspectives on major public problems; relevance can improve theory by forcing scholars to face real constraints and human agency; and political scientists have an ethical duty to address problems that affect many lives. I would add one limit: relevance should not mean giving officials easy talking points or turning scholars into consultants. The best version is independent relevance, where research stays honest and evidence-based while still speaking to choices that matter.

Barma & Goldgeier (2022) · How Not to Bridge the Gap

International Affairs · bridging the academy–policy gap, and “lab leaks”

A “lab leak” is an academic idea that leaves the scholarly world, gets simplified or misused, and then helps legitimate bad policy. Barma and Goldgeier discuss Paul Musgrave’s worry that democratic peace theory may have leaked into policy in this way, especially around the Iraq War. They are careful, though: they do not simply blame scholars for the war. They argue that democratic peace ideas were less important in launching the war than in justifying it after weapons of mass destruction were not found. The broader lesson is that ideas travel through messy channels. Scholars cannot fully control how their findings are used, but they should state uncertainty, scope conditions, and limits more clearly. Their advice is organized around the four I’s. Influence should not be sought for its own sake; scholars should build real expertise, be patient, and choose the medium that fits the audience. Interlocutors matter because policy is not just made by top officials. Long-serving bureaucrats, congressional staff, international organizations, civil society, and private actors all have different needs and incentives, and scholars should speak without jargon and listen to what practitioners know. Integrity means not changing findings to gain access, not overstating what one study proves, and being honest about uncertainty and scope. Inclusion means that whose expertise gets heard matters. Excluding women, scholars of color, LGBTQ scholars, and Global South scholars weakens both IR and policy advice. I agree with the advice because it avoids both isolation and self-promotion.