UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO
POLS 2310: Introduction to Politics
REVIEW FOR THE FINAL EXAM
Lecture 16: International Politics: General Overview
 The subject matter of International Relations (IR)
• Narrow: concern the relationships between the world’s government
• Wider: people and cultures around the world
• Central Trend: globalization
• Issue areas: foreign policy, war and peace, global finance, trade, and the environment
• Subfields: international security studies, international political economy (IPE)
 Collective goods problem
• How to provide something that benefits all members regardless of what each member
contributes
• Also know as free riding, burden sharing, prisoner’s dilemma, mixed interest game, tragedy of
commons
• Example: Global warming
• In general, collective goods are easier to provide in small groups
 Core principles in IR to manage collective goods problem (dominance, reciprocity,
identity)
• Dominance: establishing a power hierarchy
-Advantages:
forces a group to contribute to the common good
minimizes open conflict within the group
-Disadvantages:
lead to oppression, conflict over authority positions
• Reciprocity: rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior
-Disadvantage:
leads to downward spiral as each side punished what it believes to be negative acts of the
other
• Identity: having no self-interest and sacrificing your own self-interest for the common good
-More efficient
 Principle of self-determination
 Principle of state sovereignty
 “Responsibility to protect” principle
Lecture 17: International Order, Security, and Foreign Policy
 The concept of bounded rationality
• limited ability to make rational choices
• takes into account the cost of seeking and processing information
-optimizing and satisfying
• when an individual make decisions, their rationally is limited by the factors of the decision
problems, the cognitive limitations of the mind, and the available time to make the decision
 Main tenets of prospect theory
• people tend to be more risk-averse when in the domain gains, and more risk taking in the
domain of loses
• framing changes the way decisions markers treat a problem
• There types of framing
1. minimal
2. topical
3. comprehensive
• people usually approach a problem in a topical approach
 “Government bargaining” model of decision making
 “Organizational process” model of decision making
Lecture 18: Theories of International Relations
Traditional Theories
 The meaning of “Raison d’état”
• “Reason of State”
• the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence
• Nicolo Machiavelli (Reason of State) national of interest
 Realism
• more realistic
 Liberalism
• Immanuel Kant
 Neorealism
• 5 fundamental assumptions
1. states are unitary actors
2. states are rational
3. states want to maximize their security
4. the interaction system is anarchic
5. sattes seek power provided it does not jeacoradize security
 Neoliberalism
 Realist perception of the international system
 Realist perception of alliances
• temporary as long as their is power
 The meaning of anarchy in the international system
 Fundamental assumptions of neorealism
 Game theory:
• Aims to deduce likely outcomes given the players’ preferences and the possible moves open to
them
 The prisoner’s dilemma:
• Do you remain silent or talk to the police
• Talking is the most rational choice
• All players make choices that in the end make them all worse off than under a different set of
moves
• In IR, the PD scenario is often illustrated by the problem of two states engaged in an arms race.
Both countries will reason that they have two options
1. increasing military expenditure and weapons arsenal
2. making agrremnt to reduce weapons