No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The role of ideas in defense planning: revisiting the revolution in military affairs
Abstract
Which ideas shape defense planning and why? The following paper builds on over 80 interviews with senior defense officials to dissect the origin, evolution, and fall of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a major post-Cold War US defense innovation paradigm. In studying the emergence and diffusion of the RMA concept, my research suggests a central role for collective actors sharing constitutive ideas about practice and competing for legitimate authority and influence in the defense establishment. The rise of the RMA as an organizing idea in U.S. defense planning is thus not reducible to bureaucratic competition, technological determinism, or strategic culture as an external set of norms. Rather, it can be portrayed as a social process involving boundary activation by bureaucrats and soldiers (re)interpreting their key tasks and core missions for future war.
... However, the present focus for the MA is to accommodate the national defense policies, with the emergence of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that focuses on the technological edges [3][4]. The emergence of diverse challenges and unique environments in the military tactical threat, even among superpowers [5], has directly affected military organizations among developing nations, such as Malaysia [6]. Therefore, these developments have increased the challenges military leaders face in preserving soldier's commitment to their job [7][8]. ...
In comparison with the western military setting, the absence of the study of leadership styles and personality hardiness in the Malaysian Army (MA) has been noticeable. Personality hardiness of the soldiers', and whether military transformational and transactional leadership provides a significant impact on soldier's hardiness level, is critical in a modern military environment in facing many unique challenges, due to the increase of forward deployment rate. As such, the present study examines the proposition that the military leader's leadership styles could enhance military subordinate's hardiness level, as conceptually suggested by previous research. This is employed via the use of an investigation of Experimental Vignette Methodology (EVM); pre-test and post-test collected data on soldiers' hardiness level, with the intervention of leadership paper vignettes which involved 169 participants for Experiment 1; (transformational leadership), and 143 participants for Experiment 2; (transactional leadership). Additionally, MLQ Form 6S was employed for transformational and transactional leadership, while DRS 15 was utilized to measure the hardiness level. The results from the two experiments found that transformational leadership significantly affected subordinate military hardiness, while transactional leadership had no influence on hardiness. Finally, the implications of the present findings are assumed to further facilitate further hardiness research in the Malaysian Army, with regards to subordinate’s commitment and performance.
... Despite difficulties in predicting the future of warfare, armed forces are constantly preparing themselves for the next conflict by adapting their organizations, acquiring new equipment, and producing novel warfighting concepts (Freedman, 2017). During the 1990s and early 2000s, conceptual discussion on a revolution in military affairs (RMA) were dominant amongst Western militaries (Adamsky, 2010;Jensen, 2018). This was followed by a focus on counterinsurgency (COIN) during the Afghanistan and Iraq era (Bell, 2018;Etzioni, 2015). ...
Western military policy-formation and doctrine seems to be gravitating towards the idea of integration, reflected in concepts such as integrated campaigning, Integrated 'Operating Concept', and 'Multi-Domain Integration' – among others. Despite the increasing use of the term within military doctrines and concept papers, there is little scholarly writing on what “integration” actually means. This study contributes to the small but growing body of research on joint operations with a novel analysis on how the term “integration,” and its sister term “interoperability,” are used within academic and military discourses. The results show that the terms are given different meanings both across and within discourses. It can be deduced that “integration” is generally understood as the merging of domains and services towards joint goals while “interoperability” is often presented as the ability to combine systems, forces, and planning across services. These findings are used to create a conceptual model which distinguishes between operability, interoperability, and integration as preconditions for the conduct of joint operations. The model is in turn useful for both scholars and practitioners when discussing or assessing capabilities to perform joint operations.
... But this is not as clear in the cyber defence development case. One could also argue that different mental models are partly similar to the separate cultures theory and that shared mental models are similar to the "consensus cultures" framed by Kier (2017) or to Jensen's (2018) "new theory of victory." Nevertheless, there is a difference. ...
Heightened political tensions and advances in technological development have prompted Scandinavian countries to increase investment in military research and capability development. The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of why actors sharing similar strategic cultures implement new technology for military purposes differently. The research is founded on a cognitive-psychological perspective comparing two cases of innovation processes: Swedish nuclear weapons development during the Cold War and developments in Swedish cyber defence during the first decades of the 21st century. The main finding is that military innovation is better explained through a consideration of shared mental models of new technology than it is through a consideration of strategic cultures. The analysis shows there are implications for capability development. First, military innovation processes are only initiated if and when new technology appears militarily relevant to an actor; thus, the ability to correctly assess the military relevance of technology at an early stage is crucial. Second, the forming of shared mental models can both contribute to and counteract military innovation and, thus, decision-makers need to be aware both that mental models can be shared and that confirmation bias affects actors on a collective level. Third, it is likely that military innovation processes benefit from mental models being challenged and from diverging mental models being made evident. Consequently, it is good practice, also from this study’s perspective, to diversify and welcome different views on the use of new technology. Further studies are solicited in order to develop practical guidelines.
... Less mature nations may not be focusing on this category, either due to resource limitations, or due to a blind spot in their national policy and strategy. The importance for this category in the literature as a source of competitive advantage is abundantly clear however (Davis 2018;Jensen 2018). Ultimately, each category pertaining to the "means" perspective (or a combination of categories thereof) enables activities and processes taking place within the "ways" perspective. ...
As the gap between strategic commitments and budgetary constraints continues to grow, defence organisations have introduced performance management initiatives to support decision-making and to improve governance. However, introducing managerial practices in public organisations, including defence, proves to be challenging. As performance management initiatives within defence suffer from an implementation gap, strategic benefits are not being harnessed. In our study, we first exploit the results of a systematic literature review to better anchor the encountered challenges within the literature. We then apply thematic analysis to a unique dataset from twelve NATO countries to propose a new defence-specific performance management framework for the strategic level. As the framework preserves the benefits of existing initiatives while mitigating most recorded challenges, it is proposed as a new guide for designing and assessing defence performance management efforts. Thereby, professionals and scholars are provided with a powerful instrument to address the implementation gap. Moreover, the theoretical and empirical lens adopted facilitates alignment between performance management initiatives, defence policy, defence strategy, and strategic objectives. Notably, policy goals and strategic “ends” are clearly connected to critical processes and resources. Thereby, the proposed framework better supports discussions with key defence stakeholders pertaining to the gap between commitments and constraints.
... Less mature nations may not be focusing on this category, either due to resource limitations, or due to a blind spot in their national policy and strategy. The importance for this category in the literature as a source of competitive advantage is abundantly clear however (Davis 2018;Jensen 2018). Ultimately, each category pertaining to the "means" perspective (or a combination of categories thereof) enables activities and processes taking place within the "ways" perspective. ...
In recent years, performance measurement and management systems have been introduced in a variety of public organisations to support strategic-level decision making. These endeavours have met with mixed success.
The research documented here focuses on the performance measurement and management efforts of individual nations to guide strategic-level defence decision making. More particular guidance on measuring the performance of national capability-based planning processes can be found in the second report issued by this Research Task Group.
The Research Task Group responsible for this report was approved by the NATO Research & Technology Board in 2011 and had its first meeting in February 2012. The participating members have been Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom
and ACT.
... The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated U.S. military prowess in then-modern manoeuvre warfare. It culminated years of development and training (Jensen 2018). The changes were remarkable, whether or not the wars themselves were good ideas or disasters, whether or not the ideas were fully and consistently implemented, and whether or not the changes were sufficient for war winning. ...
... See Cohen (2018), 60-63 for a different related argument: that the difficulty of predicting future strategic needs means that it may be best for defense reviews to make only incremental changes to defense strategy. 2. See Jensen (2018) for an application of other policy process theory that sheds light on links between defense planning and policy. ...
... The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated U.S. military prowess in then-modern manoeuvre warfare. It culminated years of development and training (Jensen 2018). The changes were remarkable, whether or not the wars themselves were good ideas or disasters, whether or not the ideas were fully and consistently implemented, and whether or not the changes were sufficient for war winning. ...
... The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated U.S. military prowess in then-modern manoeuvre warfare. It culminated years of development and training (Jensen 2018). The changes were remarkable, whether or not the wars themselves were good ideas or disasters, whether or not the ideas were fully and consistently implemented, and whether or not the changes were sufficient for war winning. ...
The principles and formalities of modern U.S. Defence planning stem from the 1960s and have largely served well. This paper, however, is about the special challenges that arise when major changes have been needed, some even transformational in character. It discusses how changing realities, independent studies and analysis, events, leaders, and political processes have led to changes not easily instigated within normal processes. Several examples are discussed for the period 1976–2016. Today, the United States and allies again face major challenges that require major military changes. Those have not yet been decided, much less accomplished. The paper draws on lessons from earlier periods to identify obstacles to and mechanisms for change. The last section focuses on defence analysis, which has sometimes been an obstacle but can be part of the solution. The paper urges a new ethic for analysis and the analysts who perform it.
... Drawing on a related public policy theoretical framework, Jensen shows how the study of defence planning can gain from employing insights from other research stemming from other policy domains. Jensen, like Norheim-Martinsen above, in this way in effect deflates at least part of the particular aura surrounding national security studies by subjecting it to approaches found useful elsewhere, thus challenges the uniqueness of Huntingtonian civil-military relations (Jensen, 2018). In Paul Davis' contribution, we also find a reflection on how the evolution of formalised US defence policy and planning systems since the 1960's have fared in the light of major changes in the international environment. ...
With this special issue of Defence Studies, we situate defence planning as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies. Indeed, in addition to the usual “downstream” focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement, we argue for the utility of an increased “upstream” focus on what is a major part of everyday defence and security policy practice for military, civilian administrative and political leadership: the forward-looking preparations for the armed forces and other capabilities of tomorrow. In particular, the special issue contributions explore two general dimensions of defence planning: the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these, defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning, as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases along the way. In this manner, paraphrasing Émile Durkheim, defence planning emerges as a “strategic fact” with dynamics of its own.
... See Cohen (2018), 60-63 for a different related argument: that the difficulty of predicting future strategic needs means that it may be best for defense reviews to make only incremental changes to defense strategy. 2. See Jensen (2018) for an application of other policy process theory that sheds light on links between defense planning and policy. ...
Defense ministries conduct strategic planning in various ways. In this article I outline tradeoffs in the design of strategic planning processes, and consider the implications of these tradeoffs for choices about the conduct of defense planning in different circumstances. Whereas an inclusive and transparent planning process is well-suited to building internal and external buy-in for a defense strategy, a more exclusive and opaque process is more likely to generate a defense strategy that departs from the status quo and speaks candidly about key challenges. The design of a defense planning process should therefore be informed by certain features of its context, such as whether the international security environment is stable or in flux and whether the defense ministry enjoys or lacks strong political support. I base the article’s findings on an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review, which served for nearly two decades as the major strategy process of the U.S. Department of Defense. This analysis draws on interviews I conducted of 23 defense officials and experts, as well as primary and secondary sources. More generally, my findings highlight for scholars and practitioners the importance of understanding how planning processes can shape defense and national security policies.
The combination of cyber and disinformation operations have become a predominant tool for state and non-state actors to achieve strategic political goals in the 21 st century. Through the lenses of the Russian interferences in the 2016 US presidential elections, this thesis tries to provide a pragmatic portrait and propose a new explanatory framework able to identify what among strategic experts has been called a "new centre of gravity" in the political-military affairs. The thesis scrutinises the definitions related to concepts such as disinformation, technology, strategy, power, and the role they play in shaping one state's national and human (in)security concerns. The case-study illustrates Russia's PSYOPs tactics and the extent to which it was able to deep-infiltrate United States' information networks and consequently push for social divisions aimed to undermine the faith of the American public opinion towards their democratic processes. The methodology embraced for the research consists in combining thoroughly qualitative and quantitative data allowing to map the US-Russia competitive relationship in the sphere of cyberspace. In order to better grasp the techniques and forms of Moscow efforts, the quantitative analysis looks at Twitter bots and trolls accounts affiliated to operatives in Kremlin. The qualitative literature, on the other hand, serves as a descriptive framework of the data analysed, to fix the latter into a contextualised analytical scheme. The research juxtaposes constructivists insights and psychological decision-making theories leading to Hofstadter's paranoid and Kahneman's "fast thinking" reactions of the American public towards Russian disinformation. The research findings show that Kremlin perpetrates disinformation not only as a tool of foreign policy but mainly out of, what Jervis calls, "misperception" of own self-relevance. Different legal-policy assessments on various levels have revealed structural and political ceilings of the Western-democratic societies for effective anti-disinformation measures. On a final note, a variety of proposals have been pinpointed for eventual future policy implementation and the conduct of other potential research related to these academic areas.
This a study of the Russian military theoretical concepts of asymmetric and indirect actions and non-military methods. It is based on Russian language sources (Russian books and military journals) and its timespan is from the 1960s to 2022. Its basic premise is that all three concepts have their roots in the Russian military's traditional admiration of cunningness and stratagems but that the Russians have not been able to build a coherent theory of warfare around them and have failed in adopting them to practise in their modern wars.
Armed forces are now in a race to exploit the technologies associated with Artificial Intelligence. Viewed as force multipliers, these technologies have the potential to speed up decision making and roboticise warfighting. At the same time, however, these systems disintermediate military roles and functions, creating shifts in the relationships of power in military organizations as different entities vie to shape and control how innovations are implemented. In this article we argue that new innovation processes are sites of emerging forms of public–private interaction and practices. On the one hand this is driving entrepreneurialism into government bureaucracy even as it forges new bonds between defence and industry. On the other, as technologies replace soldiers, a new martial culture is emerging, one that reframes the warrior geek as an elite innovation corps of prototype warrior. We seek to map these relationships and explore the implications for civil-military relations in the twenty-first century.
This article starts with a discussion of the analytical issues of the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF); based on the hypothesis that small groups of individuals, sharing a similar analysis of a policy problem sustaining a common policy change program (including orientations, arguments, and instruments) giving them a collective identity, and behaving strategically as a collective actor, can be main drivers of policy change. We then present the methodological implications of the empirical analysis of such programmatic groups and policy change programs. The methodology of the Programmatic Action Framework combines tools coming from the sociology of elites (positional analysis, analysis of professional trajectories, relational analysis) and the sociology of the policy process. It was first applied in empirical researches on health insurance reforms in France and the United States since the 1980s, shedding the light on the key role of specialized policy elites (specialized senior civil servants in France, long‐term insiders in the United States). We conclude by stressing that, because of its systematic and encompassing empirical methodology, the Programmatic Action Framework can be used in a comparative way, in other policy sectors than health care.
How might rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies affect the construction and application of military power? Despite the emerging importance of AI systems in defense modernization initiatives, there has been little empirical or theoretical study from the perspective of the international relations (IR) and security studies fields. This article addresses this shortcoming by describing AI developments and assessing the manner in which AI is likely to affect military organizations. We focus specifically on military power, as new methods and modes thereof will alter the constitution of security relationships around the world and affect the ability of states to bargain, signal, and influence in the twenty-first century. We argue that, though rapid adoption of AI technologies stands to transform states’ ways of war on a number of fronts, an AI revolution brings with it new forms of risk that must be reconciled with the widespread integration of algorithmic systems across military functions. Where new technology promises a transformation of the character of military power in some veins, it also complicates the cognitive aspects of decision-making and bureaucratic interactions in security institutions. The speed with which complex integrated AI systems enable entirely new modes of war also stands to detach human agency in a potentially destabilizing fashion from the conduct of warfare on several fronts. Preventing the negative externalities of these “ghosts in the machine” will involve significant efforts to educate decision makers, promote accountability, and restrain irresponsible employment of AI.
This article addresses why the US in its military operations tends to focus on only one dimension in war – the military narrowly understood. More precisely, in the US case, its armed forces tend to be preoccupied with platforms and understand military capabilities as those that deliver death and destruction. I explain this one-sided understanding of the military dimension in war with how the US armed forces think about future war. How the US understands future war is, in turn, a reflection of how it organizes its long-term defense planning procedures. In particular, by approaching the concept of future as by and large structurally determined, a focus on platforms becomes natural. Investments in weapons systems, too, are more easily motivated to Congress since it is easier to attach a price to developing, for example, a new submarine than it is to attach a price to the cost of developing a military organization that is adaptive, learning and anticipating. The understanding of the future as something that happens whether you like it or not is particularly odd in the US context where of course a central tenet of the American dream is that the individual creates her own future.
Through the contributions of this special issue, defence planning emerges as a strategic fact with a significance of its own. Defence planning does not merely serve as a conduit for external forces, but instead appears as an independent or intermediate variable as well as a discrete arena for national security processing. In this conclusion, we return to the overall issue of defence planning as an object of study as proposed in the introduction. We identify three analytical dimensions inspired by the contributions which offer avenues for future research on defence planning. These are process versus change, the issue of national versus comparative or international dynamics, and finally hybrid or interface dynamics. It is, in other words, important to account for the roles defence planning may play with regard to affecting change in strategic affairs, to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of defence planning in central national cases such as the US as well as the international and comparative aspects of such dynamics, and finally it is important to analyse the characteristics and effects of defence planning in its wider political, administrative and strategic contexts.
With this special issue of Defence Studies, we situate defence planning as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies. Indeed, in addition to the usual “downstream” focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement, we argue for the utility of an increased “upstream” focus on what is a major part of everyday defence and security policy practice for military, civilian administrative and political leadership: the forward-looking preparations for the armed forces and other capabilities of tomorrow. In particular, the special issue contributions explore two general dimensions of defence planning: the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these, defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning, as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases along the way. In this manner, paraphrasing Émile Durkheim, defence planning emerges as a “strategic fact” with dynamics of its own.
In recent years, paradigmatic debates in International Relations (IR) have focused on questions of epistemology and methodology. While important in their own right, these differences have obscured the basic divide in the discipline between substantialism, which takes entities as primitives, and relationalism, which takes processes of social transaction as the basic building blocks of theory. We argue that while both approaches can be fruitful, theories of processes and relations are better suited to address certain questions, most notably those involving change in global politics. Drawing on work in International Relations, sociology and philosophy, we examine what such theories entail and discuss areas of research for which they are especially suited.
Over the last ten years or so, an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics. It is perhaps best characterized by three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a theoretical focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models. This paper provides political scientists with an overview of the "new economics of organization" and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy. So far, positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy. In part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration. The other side of the coin, however, is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy. Their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice, voting and markets, and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions. This third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy. Movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature, while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy, indeed of all organizations. In fact, significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken-but by economists, not political scientists. In small numbers, of course, economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of Downs (1967), Tullock (1965), and Niskanen (1971). But this new wave of theoretical work is different. It is already a large, complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists, and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort. Work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations, an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models. This approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm, which assumes away all organizational considerations, to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms, corporations, and other enterprises behave as they do. Propo
Kathleen Thelen explains the historical origins of important cross-national differences in four countries (Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan), and also provides a theory of institutional change over time. The latter is considered a frontier issue in institutionalist analysis, of which there are several varieties emerging from economics, political science, and sociology. Thelen's study contributes to the literature on the political economy of the developed democracies that focuses on different institutional arrangements defining distinctive models of capitalism.
In recent decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another. This book was first published in 2001.
Foreword- P. Hall The Problem of Policy Change Competing Elites, Legitimate Authority, Structured Ideas Interests in Question Elite Actors and Policy Innovation Responding to External Shocks Pre-emptive adaptation Accounting for Change: The Role of Programmatic Elites
How does the practice turn play out in international relations? This study offers a concise introduction to the core approaches, issues and methodology of International Practice Theory, examining the design, strategies and technique of practice theoretical research projects interested in global politics, and outlining issues for a future agenda. © Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger 2014. All rights reserved.
Continuing the focus on military doctrine in this special issue, this essay explores institutional mechanisms that enable otherwise rigid bureaucracies to innovate. Rather than focus on organizational and strategic culture, the piece explores the role of pragmatic officers using incubators and advocacy networks to escape their iron cage. The piece traces the institutional origins of the US counterinsurgency doctrine between 2003 and 2006 to highlight the role of special study groups and cross-cutting bureaucratic coalitions in creating a space to deliberate over how to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The New Custodians of the State uses contemporary France to reassess sociological theories of political and policymaking elites. Based on detailed case studies drawn from social policy and national defense sectors, it concludes that a new type of sectorally-based elite has risen to prominence in France since the 1980s. Genieys suggests that programmatic elites found in specific policy sectors, made up of individuals linked both by common career paths and the resulting skills and expertise, should be seen as new guardians of state power.
Like their "technocratic" predecessors, programmatic elites maintain a high degree of independence with respect to electoral politics and to civil society; like them, they share an ideological commitment to protect and expand the role of the state in French society. Unlike them, however, these new guardians of the state are structured around specific policy programs and limited in scope to a given sector. Competition among programmatic elites at the highest levels of the state emerges as the chief driving force behind innovation for social change.
The New Custodians of the State introduces programmatic elites both as real-world actors and as an analytic category and highlights the limits of elite power by analyzing the defeat of efforts by the French Ministry of Defense. This book presents a thought-provoking critical case study that suggests that models presenting either a single unified state elite or those that herald or decry the demise of the state require modification. The work will be of interest to students and scholars of France, and its society and government as well as anyone interested in the policymaking process in other countries with respect to domestic policy or national defense.
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
Scholars in comparative politics and international relations routinely evaluate causal hypotheses by referring to counterfactual cases where a hypothesized causal factor is supposed to have been absent. The methodological status and the viability of this very common procedure are unclear and are worth examining. How does the strategy of counterfactual argument relate, if at all, to methods of hypothesis testing based on the comparison of actual cases, such as regression analysis or Mill's Method of Difference? Are counterfactual thought experiments a viable means of assessing hypotheses about national and international outcomes, or are they methodologically invalid in principle? The paper addresses the first question in some detail and begins discussion of the second. Examples from work on the causes of World War I, the nonoccurrence of World War III, social revolutions, the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America, and the origins of fascism and corporatism in Europe illustrate the use, problems and potential of counterfactual argument in small-N-oriented political science research.
Contemporary military theory has evolved around a thesis about the recent fundamental transformation in the nature of war. Known in professional circles as an Information-Technology Revolution in Military Affairs (IT-RMA), this thesis served as an intellectual foundation for defense innovations on both sides of the Atlantic. The IT-RMA became an umbrella term for the family of military visions, doctrines and concepts, such as effect-based operations (EBO) and network-centric warfare (NCW), and since the mid-1990s has turned into an integral part of the professional military lexicon worldwide. In many ways, an intellectual history of the IT-RMA encapsulates the development of modern military theory. This special issue analyzes developments in contemporary military thought and focuses on the ideas generated within the American defense milieu during the 1990s, and further disseminated to military communities across the globe.
Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Charles Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property. Charles Tilly is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has published more than twenty scholarly books, including twenty specialized monographs and edited volumes on political processes, inequality, population change and European history.
Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static ''things'' or in dynamic, unfolding relations. Rational-actor and norm-based models, diverse holisms and structuralisms, and statistical ''variable'' analyses continue implicitly or explicitly to prefer the former point of view. By contrast, this ''manifesto'' presents an alternative, ''relational'' perspective, first in broad, philosophical outlines, then by exploring its implications for both theory and empirical research. In the closing pages, it ponders some of the difficulties and challenges now facing relational analysis, taking up in turn the issues of boundaries and entities, network dynamics, causality, and normative implications.
This essay explores the question of how formal institutions change. Despite the importance assigned by many scholars to the role of institutions in structuring political life, the issue of how these institutions are themselves shaped and reconfigured over time has not received the attention it is due. In the 1970s and 1980s, a good deal of comparative institutionalist work centered on comparative statics and was concerned with demonstrating the ways in which different institutional arrangements drove divergent political and policy outcomes (e.g., Katzenstein 1978). In addition, scholarship in the comparative historical tradition has yielded important insights into the genesis of divergent (usually national) trajectories. Works in this vein include some classics such as Gerschenkron (1962), Moore (1966), and Shefter (1977), but also significant recent contributions such as Collier and Collier (1991), Skocpol (1992), Spruyt (1994), Ertman (1997), Gould (1999), and Huber and Stephens (2001). Finally, we have a number of analyses that address the issue of “feedback mechanisms” that are responsible for the reproduction of various institutional and policy trajectories over time (e.g., Pierson 1993; Skocpol 1992; Weir 1992b). Ongoing theoretical work centering on the concept of path dependence by Mahoney, Pierson, and others has lent greater precision to previous formulations based on the dual notions of “critical junctures” and “historical trajectories” (Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000a). As these authors have shown, some of the major works in comparative historical analysis can be read as illustrations of path dependence in social and political development.
An important research programme has developed in economics that extends neo-classical economic theory in order to examine the effects of institutions on economic behaviour. The body of work emerging from this line of inquiry includes contributions from various branches of economic theory, such as the economics of property rights, the theory of the firm, cliometrics and law and economics. This book is a comprehensive survey of this research programme which the author terms 'neoinstitutional economics'. The author proposes a unified approach to this research, integrating the work of various contributors and emphasising the common principles of inquiry that tie the work together. The theoretical discussion is accompanied by empirical studies dealing with a range of institutions and economic systems. This book will serve as the primary resource for economists and students who want to learn about this important branch of economic theory.
Stephen Peter Rosen is a Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow at the Naval War College. This article draws from a book he is currently writing on military innovation in peacetime and war.
The author would like to thank the following people for their advice and criticism of earlier drafts of this article: Andrew Marshall, James Q. Wilson, Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Chip Pickett, Barry Posen, and Barry Watts.
1. This definition has the slightly paradoxical effect of excluding some dramatic changes in military technology from the term "major military innovation." This point is illustrated by Vincent Davis' study of innovation of post-World War II U.S. Navy operations. Davis makes it quite clear that, in the cases he defines as innovations (the introduction of atomic bombs into the U.S. naval aviation strike force and the introduction of nuclear propulsion systems into the U.S. submarine forces), new technologies were used to help perform existing missions better, and not to change them radically. See The Politics of Innovation: Patterns in Navy Cases (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1967), pp. 7, 15.
2. It is doubtful that a single theory could explain military innovation in both the United States and Japan in the 1930s, for example, since military innovation in Japan in that period, unlike the United States, was occasionally associated with the murder of civilian officials by their military counterparts in order to resolve professional differences of opinion. See Hugh Byas, Government By Assassination (New York: Knopf, 1942).
3. The number of military organizations that did not innovate in response to defeat is large. See, for example, the case of the Czarist Army after the Russo-Japanese War discussed by John Bushnell, "The Tsarist Army after the Russo-Japanese War: The View From the Field," in Lt. Col. Charles R. Schrader, USA, Proceedings of the 1982 International Military History Symposium: The Impact of Unsuccessful Military Campaigns on Military Institutions 1860-1980 (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 1982), pp. 77-99; and on the failure of the United States to innovate after its failure to win the mixed counterinsurgency and conventional war in Vietnam, John P. Lovell, "Vietnam and the U.S. Army: Learning to Cope With Failure," in George K. Osborn, ed., Democracy, Strategy, and Vietnam (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), pp. 121-154.
4. The case of the introduction of nuclear propulsion into the United States Navy is not reviewed in this paper. An exhaustive study of Hyman Rickover has already laid to rest the myth, cultivated by Rickover himself, that it was only the maverick Rickover, supported by Congress, who forced nuclear propulsion upon a resistant Navy. See Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen, Rickover: Controversy and Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 118-134. Conversely, the failure of intense presidential intervention to produce successful innovation in the area of counterinsurgency capabilities and to support the "mavericks" in the Special Forces has been thoroughly documented. See Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), Chapter 2, "The Revolution That Failed."
5. Although the case studies presented here focus on successful innovation, the best study of the failure of the Royal Navy to develop carrier aviation tends to support the hypothesis about intellectual revolutions and career paths advanced here. Many technical advances in aircraft carriers were made in the Royal Navy before they were made in the U.S. Navy, but British carriers were still seen as adjuncts to battleships, and aviators flying off of Royal Navy carriers could never advance to senior command in the Royal Navy, because they were Royal Air Force officers. Geoffrey Till, Airpower and the Royal Navy 1914-1945: A Historical Survey (London: McDonald and Jane's, 1979), pp. 45-47, 65, 74, 80, 139, 149.
6. In a case not discussed in detail here, the Office of the Secretary of Defense appears to have helped a group of senior officers who were innovators within the U.S. Army by protecting the advocates of airmobile helicopter warfare against their opponents within the Army. Lt. Gen. John J. Tolson, Vietnam Studies: Airmobility 1961-1971, Department of the Army (Washington...
Mechanisms in a theory are defined here as bits of theory about entities at a different level (e.g., individuals) than the main entities being theorized about (e.g., groups), which serve to make the higher-level theory more supple, more accurate, or more general. The criterion for whether it is worthwhile to theorize at lower levels is whether it makes the theory at the higher levels better, not whether lower-level theorizing is philosophically necessary. The higher-level theory can be made better by mechanisms known to be inadequate in the discipline dealing with the lower level. Conditions for the usefulness of lower-level theorizing are proposed, with many examples from various social and physical sciences.
Numerous sector-specific studies have shown that over the past 20 years different parts of the French state have changed their relationship to national industry and the European Union. However, the defence sector has been both under-studied and the victim of an assumption of ‘military exceptionalism’. Based upon empirical research into the ordering of the Airbus A400M military transporter, this article uses a cognitive approach to policy analysis to unpack the sets of actors and distribution of power which today make French procurement decisions. It shows that many policy preferences have changed considerably but that the key protagonists have remained remarkably stable.
This article combines the methods of institutionalist analysis and the sociology of elites to look inside the black box of the French state. We identify key groups of policymakers in the social policy sector and track both their policy preferences and the results of their efforts from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s. Our conclusion is that budgetary and ideological challenges to existing policies led to the consolidation within the Ministry of Social Affairs of what we label a “programmatic elite,” whose influence derived less from the positions held by its members than from the coherence and applicability of its state-centered policy model. The competition for legitimate authority between such programmatic elites, we conclude, is an important but often overlooked endogenous source of policy change in situations of institutional stability.
Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. 20.00 paper.
In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
In France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the decades from the late 1980s to the present have witnessed significant change in health policy. Although this has included the spread of internal competition and growing autonomy for certain nonstate and parastate actors, it does not follow that the mechanism at work is a "neoliberal convergence." Rather, the translation into diverse national settings of quasi-market mechanisms is accompanied by a reassertion of regulatory authority and strengthening of statist, as opposed to corporatist, management of national insurance systems. Thus the use of quasi-market tools brings state-strengthening reform. The proximate and necessary cause of this dual transformation is found in the work of small, closely integrated groups of policy professionals, whom we label "programmatic actors." While their identity differs across cases, these actors are strikingly similar in functional role and motivation. Motivated by a desire to wield authority through the promotion of programmatic ideas, rather than by material or careerist interests, these elite groups act both as importers and translators of ideas and as architects of policy. The resulting elite-driven model of policy change integrates ideational and institutionalist elements to explain programmatically coherent change despite institutional resistance and partisan instability.
"The central thesis of this book is that individuals jointly using a CPR face incentives leading to harm for themselves and others. The degree of harm depends on the rules they use and the environment in which they make decisions. We formalize this relationship using the framework of institutional analysis and noncooperative game theory. The relationship between rules and games is of fundamental importance to all of the social sciences and particularly when social science is used in policy-making. We intend to explore the general relationship between rules and games and do so by focusing on a broad family of games of considerable substantive importance—the games that appropriators play when they decide upon investment and harvesting activities related to CPRs. We begin with a formal definition for a CPR and a CPR dilemma."
This article explores the theoretical implications of the logic of practicality in world politics. In social and political life, many practices do not primarily derive from instrumental rationality (logic of consequences), norm-following (logic of appropriateness), or communicative action (logic of arguing). These three logics of social action suffer from a representational bias in that they focus on what agents think about instead of what they think from. According to the logic of practicality, practices are the result of inarticulate know-how that makes what is to be done self-evident or commonsensical. Insights from philosophy, psychology, and sociology provide empirical and theoretical support for this view. Though complementary with other logics of social action, the logic of practicality is ontologically prior because it is located at the intersection of structure and agency. Building on Bourdieu, this article develops a theory of practice of security communities arguing that peace exists in and through practice when security officials practical sense makes diplomacy the self-evident way to solving interstate disputes. The article concludes on the methodological quandaries raised by the logic of practicality in world politics.For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, many thanks to Emanuel Adler, Janice Bially Mattern, Raymond Duvall, Stefano Guzzini, Jef Huysmans, Markus Kornprobst, Jennifer Mitzen, Iver Neumann, Daniel Nexon, David Welch, Alexander Wendt, and Michael Williams, as well as the journal s reviewers.