Of Paradigms and Preferences

Abstract

Brian Rathbun wonders if “the political beliefs of those who study international relations affect their beliefs about international relations and the way they are studied.” In his search for an answer, he turns to a body of literature in social psychology called social dominance theory (SDT) and a psychometric construct called social dominance orientation (SDO). SDT is “a general theory of societal group-based inequality” (Pratto, Sidanius, and Levin 2006;:2 73; for overviews, see also Sidanius and Pratto 1999:31–57; Pratto et al. 2006:273–281). The two SDO scales in use purport to measure “the extent of individuals’ desires for group-based dominance and inequality” (Pratto et al. 2006: 281), on the assumption that individual desires, shared beliefs, and institutional arrangements all reinforce each other in making group-based inequality a pervasive feature of social life whenever there is surplus value to be extracted and distributed. As psychologists, social dominance theorists never tell us whether the groups in question are an institutionalized feature of any given individual's social reality and generally downplay institutional arrangements. Instead they talk a great deal about “psychological and ideological forces that help sustain group dominance” (Pratto et al. 2006:280) and underscore the importance of “legitimizing myths” (defined as “societal, consensually shared social ideologies.”Pratto et al. 2006:275). Rathbun starts with ideology. He wants to know how “political ideology might be associated with one's choice of international relations paradigms.” An ideology is “a configuration of ideas and attitudes” forming a “belief system,” and a paradigm consists of “beliefs about the nature of the world” (all quotations not otherwise identified are from Rathbun's piece). He says that ideologies and paradigms are similar in structure. I fail to see how this might be so, unless we stipulate that paradigms such as we have in the field of International Relations (IR) …