Theory and the Politics in World Politics

Many of the competing intellectual traditions and research programs in world politics share a core set of metatheoretical assumptions about the process of strategic interaction in politics. Their differences are anchored in different empiricalassumptions about the types of issues, actors, political arenas, and strategic situations that characterize world politics, not in different metatheoretical assumptions about how the process of politics works. Systematically identifying these shared assumptions will help eliminate many false problematics that have entangled the field, create a positive heuristic for research that can link international and domestic politics, and move political scientists toward more general theories of world politics. Building research programs around widely shared metatheoretical principles about how politics works will, moreover, increase the ease with which scholars can communicate their insights to nonacademic audiences.