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Ideational Liberalism

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Ideational liberalism
Ideational liberalism views the configuration of domestic social identities and values as a basic determinant of state preferences and, therefore, of interstate conflict and cooperation. According to Moravcsik (1997: 525) social identity is defined as the set of preferences shared by individuals concerning the proper scope and nature of public goods provision, which in turn specifies the nature of legitimate domestic order by stipulating which social actors belong to the polity and what is owed them. Liberals take no distinctive position on the origins of social identities, which may result from historical accretion or be constructed through conscious collective or state action, nor on the question of whether they ultimately …show more content…
Rather than assuming that market structure always creates incentives for cooperation among social actors as well as states, or focusing exclusively on those issue areas where it does, as do some liberal ideologies, liberal IR theory focuses on market structure as variable explaining both openness and closure. The resulting commercial liberal explanation of relative gains seeking in foreign economic policy is quite distinct from that of Realism, which emphasizes security externalities and relative (hegemonic) power, or that of Institutionalism, which stresses informational and institutional constraints on interstate collective action. One source of pressure for protection lies in uncompetitive, monopolistic or undiversified sectors or factors that lose the most from liberalization and have an incentive to oppose it. Commercial liberalism has important implications for security affairs as well. Trade is generally a less costly means of accumulating wealth than war, sanctions or other coercive means, not least due to the minimization of collateral damage. Yet governments sometimes have an incentive to employ coercive means to create and control international markets. To explain this variation, domestic distributional issues and the structure of global markets are again critical. Yet economic development tends to increase the material stake of social actors in existing …show more content…
The key variable in republican liberalism is the mode of domestic political representation, which determines whose social preferences are institutionally privileged. When political representation is biased in favour of particularistic groups, they tend to capture government institutions and employ them for their ends alone, systematically passing on the costs and risks to others (Katzenstein et al, 1998: 647). The precise policy of governments depends on which domestic groups are represented. The simplest resulting prediction is that policy is biased in favour of the governing coalition or powerful domestic groups. Many liberal arguments are concerned with the seizure of state institutions by administrators (rulers, armies, and bureaucracies), similar arguments apply to privileged societal groups that capture the state or simply act independently of

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