It has been awhile since I have thought about this theoretical construct and really blogged about international affairs theory in general, but after reading Mr. Google Sucks’s post on Select2008 (it is a site that algorithmically determines who you should vote for based on how you answer ‘yes/no’ questions in a very nice web 2.0 layout–read: SEO-unfriendly), I thought it would interesting to provide my views about Strategic Choice.

Now, I first have to qualify any additional statements about my background in international politics. I did Model United Nations in high school and undergrad, along with majoring in International Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. Therefore you were exposed to two (three if you count “individualism”) main theories: Liberalism or Realism. Since I was very big on international economics and am an optimistic person by nature, I sided very easily with Liberalism (more towards Neo-Liberalism if you must know).

It was not until I went to graduate school at the International Relations and Pacific Studies program at UCSD did I learn about the concept of Strategic Choice (sometimes known as “Rational Choice” or “Institutionalism”). To give a basic understanding of Strategic Choice, essentially take Liberalism or Realism (where international events influence domestic events) and flip it on its head (eg: Strategic Choice is where domestic events affect international events). You can quickly see how nearly every single International Affairs major quickly began to hate Strategic Choice as a theory (and why we affectionately called it ‘rat choice.’

What made matters worse for those of us who believed in Liberalism (or Realism) was the professors insistence on forcing to write papers and use Strategic Choice as the only way to think, thereby really reducing the our own and the class’s learnings on international affairs. That said, we definitely had fun tearing apart the professors who would espouse a theory and yet had no experience in International Affairs themselves. This is not to say that all of them did not have experience, just that the ones that taught us about Strategic Choice specifically did not.

What made things more frustrating for those of us in the IR field (personally drove me up the wall) was the consistent berating against Liberalism or Realism for being unable to predict the fall of Communism in the USSR, and yet, their own ‘theory’ was not to be used for predictive purposes.

What I found to be the fatal flaw within Strategic Choice was its insistent American-centric (and mind you, I am an American) concept that everybody and every politician acts the exact same around the world. That is, even under different governmental systems and under different cultural, religious, and historical developments, every single politician is devoted to getting him- or herself reelected over anything else and that there basically are no politicians out there trying to make government better. Essentially it tried to take human beings and simplify how complicated everyone was so far down to one exact point that every single politician wants to get reelected, regardless of what will happen outside of their own country.

Yes, you could say that majoring in International Affairs would definitely make me hostile to a theory that simplified everything and turned IR on its head (anti-rational choice / anti-strategic choice), but nonetheless, I believe that Strategic Choice and its simplification (mind you this school was big on econometrics, but could not consider concepts such as “interaction effects” and would try to frame the debate by providing fallacious starting assumptions. That and it’s debasement of econometrics to fit its theory of rational choice.

Other sites that go into Strategic Choice Theory: