Krasner: Structural Causes and Regime Consequences

Krasner, Stephen D. 1982. “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables.” International Organization 36:185-205.

“International regimes are defined as principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area” (185). “As a starting point, regimes have been conceptualized as intervening variables standing between basic causal factors on the one hand and outcomes and behavior on the other” (185). Krasner raises two questions based on these assumptions: “…what is the relationship between basic causal factors such as power, interest, and values and regimes?...what is the relationship between regimes and related outcomes and behavior?” (185).

Keohane and Nye: “…’sets of governing arrangements’,” “…’networks of rules, norms and procedures that regularize behavior and control its effects’” (186).

Haas: “a regime encompasses a mutually coherent set of procedures, rules, and norms” (186).

Bull: “…’general imperative principles which require or authorize prescribed classes of persons or groups to behave in prescribed ways’” (186).

Keohane: agreements are not regimes.

Jervis: “…’implies not only norms and expectations that facilitate cooperation, but a form of cooperation that is more than the following of short-run self-interest’” (187).

Waltz and Kaplan: “Waltz’s conception of the balance of power, in which states are driven by systemic pressures to repetitive balancing behavior, is not a regime; Kaplan’s conception, in which equilibrium requires commitment to rules that constrain immediate, short-term power maximization…, is a regime” (187).

Hirsch: regime as friendship

“A fundamental distinction must be made between principles and norms on the one hand, and rules and procedures on the other” (187). “Changes in rules and decision-making procedures are changes within regimes” (187). “Changes in principles and norms are changes of the regime itself” (188). “If the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures of a regime become less coherent, or if actual practice is increasingly inconsistent with principles, norms, rules, and procedures, then a regime has weakened” (189). “in sum, change within a regime involves alterations of rules and decision-making procedures, but not of norms or principles; change of a regime involves alteration of norms and principles; and weakening of a regime involves incoherence among the components of the regime or inconsistency between the regime and related behavior” (189).

Do regimes matter?: “It would take some courage, perhaps more courage than this editor possesses, to answer this question in the negative” (189).

Three points of view as to how regimes matter: “The conventional structural views the regime concept as useless, it not misleading. Modified structural suggests that regimes may matter, but only under fairly restrictive conditions. And Grotian sees regimes as much more pervasive, as inherent attributes of any complex, persistent pattern of human behavior” (190).

Susan Strange represents the conventional structural view.

Keohane and Stein represent the modified structural view.

Hopkins, Puchala and Young represent the Grotian view.

“Regimes are much more easily encompassed by a Grotian worldview. But, as the arguments made by Jervis, Keohane, Stein, Lipson, and Cohen indicate, the concept is not precluded by a realist perspective. The issue si not so much whether one accepts the possibility of principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures affecting outcomes and behavior, as what one’s basic assumption is about the normal state of international affairs…Adherents of a structural realist orientation see regimes as a phenomenon whose presence cannot be assumed and whose existence requires careful explanation…From a realist perspective, regimes are phenomena that need to be explained; from a Grotian perspective, they are data to be described” (194).

What created regimes?

-egoistic self-interest: in this volume, Stein and Keohane represent this perspective: one uses game theory, the other microeconomics.

-political power: Two different perspectives: 1.) cosmopolitian/instrumental power: “power is used to secure optimal outcomes for the system as a whole” (197); 2.) particularistic/consummatory: “power is used to enhance the values of specific actors within the system” (197).

-norms and principles: “…norms and principles that influence the regime in a particular issue-area but are not directly related to that issue-area can also be regarded as explanations for the creation, persistence, and dissipation of regimes” (200).

-usage and custom: “Usage refers to regular patterns of behavior based on actual practice; custom, to long-standing practice” (202).

-knowledge: pervasive knowledge can establish regimes (quarantine, for example).