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1. Quo Vadis, Historical International Relations? Geopolitical Marxism and the Promise of Radical Historicism

Author:
Lauri Von Pfaler and Benno Teschke
Publication Date:
06-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
John Maclean’s 1988 call “Marxism and IR: A Strange Case of Mutual Neglect” has generated a rich bounty of Marxist studies and paradigms in International Relations (IR). This cross-pollination merged in the 1990s with the “historical turn” and shaped the sub-fields of International Historical Sociology and International Political Economy. But has it left its mark on how IR is practised today? We argue that while Marxism has spoken significantly to the discipline, mainstream IR, even Historical IR, has been largely impervious to Marxist arguments, drawing the standard charge of economism and structuralism. Rectifying these critiques, we suggest that conventional historical studies of “the international” remain methodologically and substantively impoverished. We exemplify this by showing how leading Historical IR studies of “systems change” fail to explain the inside/outside and public/private differentiations constitutive of the modern international order and to integrate the “levels of analysis” they presuppose. We further argue that this rejection has been facilitated by influential Marxist IR paradigms, which ultimately privilege structuralism over historicism: While Neo-Gramscians initially mobilised “historicism” to dissolve claims about the “sameness” of international relations across time and space, the approach became identified with the reified master-category of “hegemony”. Uneven and Combined Development, in turn, has gravitated towards matching Neo-realism’s claim to theoretical universality by insisting on transhistorical model-building and nomological “grand theory”. Both approaches remain over-sociologised and fail to address international politics. Drawing on radically historicist Political Marxism, this article shows how its substantive socio-political premises explain the historical formation of the contemporary international order and re-unite the “levels of analysis” theoretically to provide a framework for non-reductionist and non-economistic accounts of historical international relations. This requires an answer to the agentic challenge of Neo-Classical Realism by reincorporating grand strategy, diplomacy, and international politics into a reformulated perspective of Geopolitical Marxism to track the full historicity of the making of international orders.
Topic:
International Relations, History, Socialism/Marxism, Sociology, Methods, Agency, Geopolicy, and Historicity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. What did they say? Respondent identity, question framing and the measurement of employment

Author:
Rosa Abraham, Nishat Anjum, Rahul Lahoti, and Hema Swaminathan
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
In developing countries, a precise approach to measuring women’s employment remains elusive. Emerging evidence underscores the pivotal role of survey methodology, encompassing respondent selection and question framing, in shaping the assessment of women’s employment. Drawing from two labor market experiments in rural India, this study offers insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of women’s employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported women’s and men’s employment figures with proxy-reported data from spouses. Women’s self-reported workforce participation surpasses proxy-reported estimates by six percentage points, while men’s estimates exhibit negligible differences. There are significant differences in the type of employment activities reported by self and proxy for both women and men. These divergences emanate from asymmetric measurement errors, stemming from gender-based norm disparities between spouses, and divergent interpretations of employment. Additionally, information asymmetry between spouses concerning women’s marginal activities and disparities in spousal characteristics contribute to these self-proxy differences. The second experiment investigates if framing of questions and recall period has an impact on reporting of labor market outcomes. We find that employing multiple questions to capture weekly employment status yields a 10-percentage-point increase in reported women’s workforce participation, but men’s participation rate decreases by six percentage points. Furthermore, when a distinct employment query is directed at each day of the preceding week as opposed to a single query for the entire week, reported women’s workforce participation increases by seven percentage points, and men’s by four percentage points.
Topic:
Development, Employment, Survey, Methods, and Gender
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

3. Telephone surveys for data collection – some reflections

Author:
Rosa Abraham and Mridhula Mohan
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
Phone-based surveys have emerged as important survey tool with their use increasing particularly during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. However, the use of phone-based surveys comes with concerns around sampling and reporting – the former refers to issues in terms of reaching the intended respondents and adequate representation of different groups while the latter relates to the quality of data collected. Based on a phone-survey of a pre-existing cross-section of households in Karnataka and Rajasthan conducted during the lockdowns of 2020, this paper looks at how sampling and reporting issues play out especially with regard to speaking to women. Access to women, via phone surveys, is limited since most women do not have their own phone, and even if they are reached, they may not have the freedom to respond to all questions asked. We recommend a detailed protocol with multiple callbacks and rescheduling of calls that reduce sampling errors and allow for greater reach of women respondents and minimise discretionary decisions from the enumerators . We also recommend a set of questions to enumerators to help reflect on the quality of data collected. While phone surveys cannot replace in-person surveys, in the event they are used, a well designed protocol along with the use of meta and para data can go a long way in enhancing the quality and reliabilty of the data.
Topic:
Women, Employment, Survey, Methods, and Data Collection
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

4. Distributional National Accounts (DINA) with Household Survey Data: Methodology and Results for European Countries

Author:
Stefan Ederer, Stefan Humer, Stefan Jestl, and Emanuel List
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW)
Abstract:
The paper builds Distributional National Accounts (DINA) using household survey data. We present a transparent and reproducible methodology to construct DINA whenever administrative tax data are not available for research and apply it to various European countries. By doing so, we build synthetic microdata files which cover the entire distribution, include all income components individually aligned to national accounts, and preserve the detailed socioeconomic information available in the surveys. The methodology uses harmonized and publicly available data sources (SILC, HFCS) and provides highly comparable results. We discuss the methodological steps and their impact on the income distribution. In particular, we highlight the effects of imputations and the adjustment of the variables to national accounts totals. Furthermore, we compare different income concepts of both the DINA and EG-DNA approach of the OECD in a consistent way. Our results confirm that constructing DINA is crucial to get a better picture of the income distribution. Our methodology is well suited to build synthetic microdata files which can be used for policy evaluation like social impact analysis and microsimulation.
Topic:
Macroeconomics, Data, and Methods
Political Geography:
Europe

5. SVRI Knowledge Exchange: Pivoting to remote research on violence against women during COVID-19

Author:
SVRI
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI)
Abstract:
Asking women about violence is a highly sensitive undertaking, requiring adherence to established protocols that centre women’s safety as a first priority.1 Failure to do so is highly unethical, as it places women at risk of (further) violence and other serious violations. Poorly designed research can also result in under-reporting and/ or misrepresentation of the issue, and it wastes important resources. Even under ideal circumstances, it is difficult to ensure that conditions exist in which women can freely share their experiences and perspectives on violence—and accurately measuring incidences of violence against women (VAW) is particularly challenging. It is thus essential that researchers establish emotional and physical safety for both themselves and respondents; doing so requires experience, intensive training, explicit protocols and the availability of referral services. The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent mitigation measures (e.g., physical distancing, mobility restrictions, lockdown, curfews, self-quarantine, etc.) are magnifying these inherent challenges for several reasons.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Women, Research, Sexual Violence, and Methods
Political Geography:
South Africa and Global Focus

6. Autarchy of Political Science and the Methodological Functions of Object Knowledge. Epistemological Analysis

Author:
Michal R. Wesierski
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Polish Political Science Yearbook
Institution:
Polish Political Science Association (PPSA)
Abstract:
Applying external scientific knowledge - i.e. knowledge achieved in the field of disciplines and sub-disciplines related to political science - in fulfiling such methodological functions as explanation and prevision (forecasting) is frequently approached in meta-scientific and meta-theoretical considerations as conducted on the ground of the family of scientific disciplines constituted by the sciences of politics. These functions can be ascribed to the purely epistemological aspect of scientific activity, not its institutional and organizational aspects. The dispute regarding the explanatory autonomy of political science is fallacious. From the logical and methodological point of view, the institutional “affiliation” of object knowledge, which constitutes a premise in complex inferences, does not play a role in the fulfilment of the assumed cognitive tasks; what is important instead is its epistemological credibility, as well as the goals of the research strategy selected by a given scholar.
Topic:
Research, Political Science, Academia, and Methods
Political Geography:
Global Focus