What are levels of analysis and what do they contribute to international relations theory?

Abstract

The objective of this article is to clarify the significance and usefulness of levels of analysis, a central IR concept, but one often used unproblematically. I argue that a level of analysis should be defined as a social structure that is examined for its effects on another social structure, or on the same social structure. Therefore, levels of analysis are also relational, meaning that one is defined, in part, in terms of its associated unit of analysis. Because this definition conceptualizes levels of analysis as methodological tools rather than ontological postulates, it is consistent with a wide range of positions on the agent-structure debate. More specifically, I show that the methodological issue of which levels of analysis a researcher employs is separate from the ontological issue of whether the theoretical lens is atomistic (reductionist) or holistic at any given level. One implication of this definition is that researchers need not view their ontological commitments as overly methodologically constraining. This article also addresses some questions raised by this conceptualization, among them the possibility of multiple social structures existing at a single level.

Notes

A previous draft of this article was presented at the 2011 annual conference of the International Studies Association–Northeast in Providence, Rhode Island. I thank Patrick Thaddius Jackson, Arne Ruckert, Brian Schmidt, Alexander Wendt and the anonymous reviewers for the many helpful comments on earlier drafts.

¹ See Onuf (1998) for a discussion of the indispensability of levels in social inquiry. Onuf also provides an alternative historical overview of levels of analysis in IR to what is presented in this article and expresses concerns similar to mine about conflating ontology and methodology when conceptualizing levels.

² For an overview of constitutive reasoning, see Wendt (1998); for an overview of critical realism, see Dessler (1999), Patomaki and Wight (2000) or Jackson (2010).

³ One might reasonably claim that, in fact, Singer is not talking about two levels of structure, but about agent and structure, another important dichotomy in structural theory. I disagree with this on the basis that agent and structure is an ontological problem, and Singer's concern is unambiguously methodological. The question he addresses regards the best way to study things, not the way things are.

⁴ Even though these are Singer's only causal mechanisms (and thus define his state level of analysis) I admit that he also treats his state as a dependent variable and, insofar as he does, employs it as a ‘unit of analysis’.

⁵ Wendt's language is confusing here, so I shall clarify. According to Wendt (1999), every structure has two levels, the micro- and macro-level. The international system, as a structure, is no different. In the case of this structure, the micro-level is called the ‘interaction’ level, and the macro-level is called the ‘systemic’ level. His failure to more clearly explicate this point has, arguably, led to a lot of confusion about how these two levels of the international system contribute to our knowledge of levels of analysis on the one hand, and agent and structure on the other. See Onuf (1998) for an expression of uncertainty due to the ambiguity of Buzan et al's (1993) conceptualization of the interaction level.

⁶ Hollis and Smith (1990) distinguish between causal (outsider) explanations and interpretive (insider) explanations, and argue that holism and individualism are compatible with both. What is important here is that holism and individualism are placed on the same causal or interpretive continuum and allowed to be a part of either story, which enables the difference between holism and individualism to be reduced to simply the magnitude of their constraining effects.

⁷ Although this was a novel insight in the levels of analysis debate, the proposition that scientific inquiry presupposes ontology dates at least as far back as Friedrich Nietzsche. In his words, ‘[s]trictly speaking, there is no such thing as science “without any presuppositions”; this thought does not bear thinking through since it is paralogical: a philosophy, a “faith,” must always be there first of all, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist’ (1967, 151–152).

⁸ I will employ Kyriakos Kontopoulos's (1992, 389) definition of a social structure which, following Anthony Giddens's lead, is ‘rules and resources recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems,’ such as humans or other social kinds. The vital question regarding individuals is not whether they are social structures, but what the ontological status of this structure is. Are individuals ontologically privileged entities that mediate between different impulses and, through an act of will, make choices, or are these structures reducible to the behaviour of their constituent brain cells, atoms, subatomic particles and so on? This specific question is outside the scope of this article but, as I explain below, its answer affects the types of question (causal or constitutive) we are able to ask at the individual level.

⁹ For a useful typology of causal effects that can be attributed to levels of analysis, see Buzan (1995). Buzan's text also provides an alternative account of the history of the levels of analysis concept to the one presented in this article.

¹⁰ The reason that holism is a necessary condition for mutual constitution is that the latter presupposes the existence of social facts which are not properties of ontologically primitive individuals.

¹¹ By ‘positivism’ Patomaki and I are employing the narrow meaning of the term, as a philosophy of science consisting of Humean causation, the ‘covering-law’ model of explanation, an instrumentalist treatment of theoretical terms, and the operationalization of scientific concepts. See Wight (2002) and Jackson (2010) for an overview of the meaning of this and other philosophies of science used in IR.

¹² However, I contend that this definition does not go far enough in expressing the meaning of atomism, which, by the word atom, connotes a commitment to reductionism that extends deeper than the individual, such that the individual itself is ontologically problematic.

¹³ See Jackson and Pettit (1990), Paul Churchland (1981) and Patricia Churchland (1986) for descriptions and defences of folk psychology and eliminative materialism, and Connolly (2002) and Wendt (2010) for explorations of the link between the study of politics and the study of the brain.

¹⁴ This points to a contradiction in Wendt's work. On the one hand, he makes the argument just mentioned, that micro-structures can generate properties and have constitutive effects, and can therefore be holistic. On the other hand, he argues that micro-level dynamics are rooted in individualism, and macro-level dynamics are rooted in holism (Wendt 2003). Therefore, in this instance, he arguably commits the common error of conflating ontology with methodology.

¹⁵ Waltz (1979, 18) defines reductionism an approach by which ‘the whole is understood by knowing the attributes and the interactions of its parts’. It maintains that ‘[o]nce the theory that explains the behavior of the parts is fashioned, no further effort is required’ (60). Note that Waltz's definition is virtually identical to mine above. This is an ontological postulate, one which maintains that structures do not have emergent properties and are therefore reducible to their parts. Waltz (18) defines systemic IR theory as a class of theories that ‘conceive of causes operating at the international level’. Again, this is a level of analysis, not an ontological stance regarding the agent-structure problem.

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Owen Temby

Owen Temby (PhD, Carleton University) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, and a research associate at the Loyola Sustainable Research Centre, Concordia University. His current research examines domestic and transnational environmental policy networks in Canada and the United States. Email: [email protected]