Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2013;7(2):167-70.
The Unavoidable Instability of Politics
DOI: 10.1590/1981-382172201300167
Nothing can be taken for granted, says a popular dictum phrased in different languages and manners. Such obvious statement, however, seems to have been forgotten by both professionals and researchers of politics. Whereas professionals have been surprised by social upheavals in societies where recent material progress seemed to have had successfully accommodated contentious political grievances—as in Brazil and Turkey—, researchers are have been caught by a wave that prioritizes hypothesis-testing over concept- and theory-building. Yet if nobody can avoid the political and the inherent conflictive nature of social life, how can any politician or bureaucrat feel safe in the iron- cage of institutions? In such a context, should political and other social scientists not revisit traditional concepts before putting forward large-N observational and experimental research designs?
In Power and Progress: International Politics in Transition, Jack Snyder reminds us of those sins as he flags out the very unstable nature of politics in both domestic and international levels. In turn, that nature posits a serious challenge to strictly institutionalist standpoints and approaches in Comparative Politics and International Relations, as well as their methodological correlates. Within 12 chapters—most of them already published as articles in the last two decades and co-authored with names such as Robert Jervis and Edward Mansfield—, Snyder defies in theoretical and empirical terms the validity of a type of research that seek of unfold the “effects of causes” without paying much attention to the “causes of effects”, to use a conceptual distinction recently advanced by two renowned methodologists, . Also, Snyder and his co-authors master the difficult yet very much needed task to bridge the gap between the literature in Comparative Politics and International Relations—a crucial step for political scientists and policy-makers in a more and more interdependent and unstable world that witnesses a power transition from the West to the East, and an expansion of the standards of living in most of the old Third World. The final result consists of a book that is useful for both research and teaching purposes given the clarity of argumentation and the level of conceptual precision. Yet Snyder incurs in a crucial pitfall: the defense—not always explicit—of a normative agenda that may not result in stable world as it is often argued, but certainly meet American and Western interests in general, and in part limits his own conclusions.
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