Across the Great Divide: Integrating Comparative and International Politics

Research in comparative and international politics often deals with the same questions, such as the nature of war, the conduct of foreign economic policy, and the consequences of different political institutions. Yet there is a pronounced gap between these two subfields of political science. In neorealist theory, this gap is to be expected, since the structure of the international system cannot be reduced to facts about its component units. Given the incompleteness of international relations theory, it rarely provides knowledge that is sufficient to explain the actions of the component units. This theoretical insufficiency provides the motivation to bring theories of domestic and international politics closer together. Three attempts to integrate comparative and international politics are discussed in this article. The first derives from the logic of two-level games as originally advanced by Robert Putnam. The second relies on a special application of second-image reversed theory by Ronald Rogowski in Commerce and Coalitions. The third examines the merging of previously distinctive systems of rules and laws among countries in the European Union. This approach does not rely on a single exemplar (as do the first two) but uses a number of institutional and legal theories to conceptualize the domestification of a regional, international political system. Thus, strategic interaction, the domestic effects of international trade flows, and institutional merging of legal systems provide three quite different metaphors for narrowing the gap between our knowledge of domestic and of international politics.