Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or imagerelated) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this “overjustification effect” can induce a partial or even net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. We also identify the settings that are conducive to multiple social norms and more generally those that make individual actions complements or substitutes, which we show depends on whether stigma or honor is (endogenously) the dominant reputational concern. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal level of incentives and how monopolistic or competitive sponsors depart from it. Sponsor competition is shown to potentially reduce social welfare.

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Incentives and Prosocial Behavior

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states--has become a cliche. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes--most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

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Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this "overjustification effect" can result in a net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. The model also allows us to identify settings that are conducive to multiple social norms of behavior, and those where disclosing one's generosity may backfire. Finally, we analyze the equilibrium contracts offered by sponsors, including the level and confidentiality or publicity of incentives. Sponsor competition may cause rewards to bid down rather than up, and can even reduce social welfare by requiring agents to engage in inefficient sacrifices.

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Cheap talk and burned money

Legislators value both campaign contributions and policy-relevant information interest groups might offer through lobbying. At the same time, there is some evidence that legislators are price setters to the extent that access to an incumbent legislator is conditional in part on making some level of campaign contribution. In this article, I consider a legislator's trade-off between granting access for informational reasons and granting access for contributions. Legislative influence in the model is exclusively through the provision of decision-relevant information, and money is used exclusively to seek access; in particular, groups cannot make contributions in exchange for policy decisions. The focus of the analysis is on the implications of the legislator's price setting on the induced pattern of demand for access and the consequences for the informational quality of subsequent legislative decisions. Moreover, although lobbyists are permitted to choose their informational source strategically, there is no possibility of dissembling when making an argument for one policy decision over another. The analysis yields both empirical predictions on the frequency and character of induced lobbying by different types of agents and provides some qualified support for limiting campaign contributions.

Allocating Access for Information and Contributions

Talk in politics is effective only insofar as the speaker is able to persuade his or her audience of the relevance of some point, or the validity of some claim, contained in the speech. From a rational choice perspective, therefore, such speech making is a strategic activity in which speakers seek to influence the beliefs of decision makers. This paper is an informal introduction to rational choice models of political decision making involving the strategic use of speech.

Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision Making

Introduction to political science

The empirical findings on whether or not legislators vote strategically are mixed. This is at least partly due to the fact that to establish any hypothesis on strategic voting, legislators' preferences need to be known, and these are typically private data. I show that under complete information, if decision making is by the amendment procedure and if the agenda is set endogenously, then sophisticated (strategic) voting over the resulting agenda is observationally equivalent to sincere voting. The voting strategies, however, are sophisticated. This fact has direct implications for empirical work on sophisticated voting.

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David Austen-Smith

Papers

Cheap talk and burned money

Allocating Access for Information and Contributions

Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision Making

Introduction to political science

Sophisticated sincerity: Voting over endogenous agendas