Socialization theory is a neglected source of explanations for cooperation in international relations. Neorealism treats socialization~or selection, more properly! as a process by which autistic non-balancers are weeded out of the anarchical international system. Contractual institutionalists ignore or downplay the possibilities of socialization in international institutions in part because of the difficulties in observing changes in interests and preferences. For constructivists socialization is a central concept. But to date it has been undertheorized, or more precisely, the microprocesses of socialization have been generally left unexamined. This article focuses on two basic microprocesses in socialization theory-persuasion and social influence-and develops propositions about the social conditions under which one might expect to observe cooperation in institutions. Socialization theories pose questions for both the structural-functional foundations of contractual institutionalist hypotheses about institutional design and cooperation, and notions of optimal group size for collective action.It is fair to say that for most international relations theorists there are two main ways in which involvement in international institutions changes state behavior in more cooperative directions. The first is through material rewards and punishments: in pursuit of a~mostly! constant set of interests or preferences a state responds to positive and negative sanctions provided exogenously by the institution~rules, membership requirements, etc.! or by certain actors within the institution. The second is through changes in the domestic distributions of power among social groups pursuing~mostly! a constant set of interests or preferences such that different distributions lead to different aggregated state preferences.Few would deny that these are plausible, observable, and probably quite frequent ways in which policies change direction after a state enters an international institution. But constructivists would expand this list, and ask if and how involvement in international institutions changes state behavior in the absence of these two conditions, and in the presence of conditions that are unique to social groups qua social groups, namely, socialization processes. How would one know if socialization processes were critical in producing cooperative behavior? Why it is important for IR theory to figure out an answer to this question?
As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite-or perhaps because of-the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions-content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity-including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping-we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well. for comments on this version.
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