POLS1005 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: World Politics, Collective Action
[Week 2]
Understanding Interests, Interactions, and Institutions
[What explains the patterns of world politics? Why do interests, interactions, and
institutions matter in international relations?]
Interests: What do ACTORS want from politics?
• Interests – what actors want to achieve through political action and their preferences over the
outcomes that might result from their political choices
• When determining actors interests, they are grouped into three categories:
- Power or security
- Economic or material welfare
- Ideological goals e.g. moral, religious, or democratic and human equality goals
These interests [roughly] divide the three schools – liberalism, realism and constructivism
ACTORS AND INTERESTS
• Actors – the basic unit for the analysis of international politics and can be individuals/groups
of people with common interests
• State – a central authority with the ability to make and enforce laws, rules and decisions
within a specified territory
• Sovereignty – the assumption that states have authority to make decisions within their own
boundaries without external interference
- A sovereign state refers to a states ability to enforce/make their own policies and
political processes
• Anarchy – the absence of a central authority with the ability to make and enforce laws that
bind all actors
• National interests – the state’s own interests, which are usually associated with security and
power
Interactions: Why can’t ACTORS always get away with what they want?
• Interactions – the ways in which the choices of two or more actors combine to produce
political outcomes
• Strategic interactions occurs when an actor’s strategies/plan of action depends on their
prediction of another actor’s strategies in response
• “The best strategy would involve an actor to do as well as possible in light of the interests and
likely strategies of the other relevant actors”
COOPERATION & BARGAINING
• Cooperation – an interaction in which two or more actors adopt policies that make at least
one actor better off relative to the status quo without making others worse off
• Cooperation does not always benefit all parties and can make actor’s worse off – it only
benefits those who adjust their policies for an outcome that is valuable for them
• Cooperation is referred to as a positive-sum game as it makes one party better off than the
other
• Cooperative interactions involves the potential for human gain unlike bargaining
• Bargaining – an interaction in which actors must choose outcomes that make one better off at
the expense of another – it is redistributive: involves allocating a fixed sum of value between
different actors
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