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Romm 12 (Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010.″ In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Time named him a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT., 2/26/2012, “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate”, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/26/432546/apocalypse-not-oscars-media-myth-of-repetition-of-doomsday-messages-on-climate/#more-432546) The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive! These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and progressive political community that when we finally had a serious shot at a climate bill, the powers that be decided not to focus on the threat posed by climate change in any serious fashion in their $200 million communications effort (see my 6/10 post “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“). These myths are so deeply ingrained in the mainstream media that such messaging, when it is tried, is routinely attacked and denounced — and the flimsiest studies are interpreted exactly backwards to drive the erroneous message home (see “Dire straits: Media blows the story of UC Berkeley study on climate messaging“) The only time anything approximating this kind of messaging — not “doomsday” but what I’d call blunt, science-based messaging that also makes clear the problem is solvable — was in 2006 and 2007 with the release of An Inconvenient Truth (and the 4 assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and media coverage like the April 2006 cover of Time). The data suggest that strategy measurably moved the public to become more concerned about the threat posed by global warming (see recent study here). You’d think it would be pretty obvious that the public is not going to be concerned about an issue unless one explains why they should be concerned about an issue. And the social science literature, including the vast literature on advertising and marketing, could not be clearer that only repeated messages have any chance of sinking in and moving the needle. Because I doubt any serious movement of public opinion or mobilization of political action could possibly occur until these myths are shattered, I’ll do a multipart series on this subject, featuring public opinion analysis, quotes by leading experts, and the latest social science research. Since this is Oscar night, though, it seems appropriate to start by looking at what messages the public are exposed to in popular culture and the media. It ain’t doomsday. Quite the reverse, climate change has been mostly an invisible issue for several years and the message of conspicuous consumption and business-as-usual reigns supreme. The motivation for this post actually came up because I received an e-mail from a journalist commenting that the “constant repetition of doomsday messages” doesn’t work as a messaging strategy. I had to demur, for the reasons noted above. But it did get me thinking about what messages the public are exposed to, especially as I’ve been rushing to see the movies nominated for Best Picture this year. I am a huge movie buff, but as parents of 5-year-olds know, it isn’t easy to stay up with the latest movies. That said, good luck finding a popular movie in recent years that even touches on climate change, let alone one a popular one that would pass for doomsday messaging. Best Picture nominee The Tree of Life has been billed as an environmental movie — and even shown at environmental film festivals — but while it is certainly depressing, climate-related it ain’t. In fact, if that is truly someone’s idea of environmental movie, count me out. The closest to a genuine popular climate movie was the dreadfully unscientific The Day After Tomorrow, which is from 2004 (and arguably set back the messaging effort by putting the absurd “global cooling” notion in people’s heads! Even Avatar, the most successful movie of all time and “the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid,” as one producer put it, omits the climate doomsday message. One of my favorite eco-movies, “Wall-E, is an eco-dystopian gem and an anti-consumption movie,” but it isn’t a climate movie. I will be interested to see The Hunger Games, but I’ve read all 3 of the bestselling post-apocalyptic young adult novels — hey, that’s my job! — and they don’t qualify as climate change doomsday messaging (more on that later). So, no, the movies certainly don’t expose the public to constant doomsday messages on climate. Here are the key points about what repeated messages the American public is exposed to: The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday messages, let alone constant ones, on climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online). There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face. The same goes for the news media, whose coverage of climate change has collapsed (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“). When the media do cover climate change in recent years, the overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages — and many outlets still feature hard-core deniers. Just imagine what the public’s view of climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say, unemployment, the housing crisis or even the deficit? When was the last time you saw an “employment denier” quoted on TV or in a newspaper? The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, “Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding? Our political elite and intelligentsia, including MSM pundits and the supposedly “liberal media” like, say, MSNBC, hardly even talk about climate change and when they do, it isn’t doomsday. Indeed, there isn’t even a single national columnist for a major media outlet who writes primarily on climate. Most “liberal” columnists rarely mention it. At least a quarter of the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that global warming is a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In the MSM, conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe mock clean energy sometime. The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted above, the one time they did run a major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate change, particularly doomsday messaging Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked. There is very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular websites. General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is ain’t doomsday messaging. Go to the front page of the (moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday? If you want to find anything approximating even modest, blunt, science-based messaging built around the scientific literature, interviews with actual climate scientists and a clear statement that we can solve this problem — well, you’ve all found it, of course, but the only people who see it are those who go looking for it. Of course, this blog is not even aimed at the general public. Probably 99% of Americans haven’t even seen one of my headlines and 99.7% haven’t read one of my climate science posts. And Climate Progress is probably the most widely read, quoted, and reposted climate science blog in the world. Anyone dropping into America from another country or another planet who started following popular culture and the news the way the overwhelming majority of Americans do would get the distinct impression that nobody who matters is terribly worried about climate change. And, of course, they’d be right — see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2.” It is total BS that somehow the American public has been scared and overwhelmed by repeated doomsday messaging into some sort of climate fatigue. If the public’s concern has dropped — and public opinion analysis suggests it has dropped several percent (though is bouncing back a tad) — that is primarily due to the conservative media’s disinformation campaign impact on Tea Party conservatives and to the treatment of this as a nonissue by most of the rest of the media, intelligentsia and popular culture. There is intrinsic value to the future-counterfactual simulation of the 1ac – representations of future climate change impacts leads to new solutions external to the aff and avoid traditional pedagogical dilemmas of role-playing --sex edited --attempts to project conceptions of the past into the future rely on an anchoring bias that is flawed – new scenarios must be injected to understand new futures
(Timothy and Thomas Mahnken, “Conceiving of Future War: The Promise of Scenario Analysis for International Relations,” International Studies Review, 15) As noted in our discussion of the counterfactuals literature, most scholars writing about the method focus on history. We argue that future counterfactuals may assist scholars in the same ways as historical ones and offer additional benefits. Scenarios may be useful for theory building and development, identifying new hypotheses, analyzing data-poor research topics, articulating “world views,” setting new research agendas, avoiding cognitive biases, and teaching.¶ Theory Building and Development¶ The structured analysis of future counterfactuals offers a unique approach for the study of causal effects in social systems. The first category, and perhaps most significant, is the ability of researchers to use scenarios to identify variables of interest and consider ways to measure them. This is an approach sometimes rec- ommended for qualitative research; it consists of writing a notional depiction of what a case study might look like. This exercise helps researchers to think through what variables are of greatest interest, what values those variables might take on, and how they interact to cause values of the dependent variable. Sce- nario analysis is one way in which researchers may conduct such a notional case study. Rather than introduce a timeless or historical vignette regarding fictional circumstances, the researcher may find it beneficial to place their case in the future. This helps orient the research project toward current and anticipated political issues—thus increasing the relevance of the work—even if the actual case studies are historical. Thinking through the causal process in this way helps the researcher to identify a wider range of explanatory variables, including those that have not yet occurred or may be of very low probability (but are still consis- tent with existing or proposed theoretical arguments). Scenario analysis also helps the researcher to consider the range of values that the identified indepen- dent variables may take on, as exploration of different “worlds” pushes the boundaries of the researcher’s predispositions going into the research project. Robust scenario analysis thus helps the researcher to identify the upper and lower bounds of their theory.¶ Second, a commonly cited advantage of counterfactual reasoning that is useful for this process of theory building is a researcher’s attempt to manipulate one variable in a causal process while holding others constant, thus isolating the effects of different values of the independent variable on the dependent vari- able. Manipulating one variable at a time to do a better job of analyzing causal processes is often very difficult to do, as, in the real world, interactions between variables often lead to unpredictable and nonlinear outcomes (Jervis 1997:34– 60). For instance, a scholar conducting an analysis of tax rates and other domes- tic legislation regarding oil may use a counterfactual of a different average oil price in the 1970s. Such a counterfactual would have some fairly obvious implica- tions for the domestic political question, but a world in which that one variable were manipulated would have a large number of equally plausible second- and third-order consequences for regional politics in the Middle East. Those conse- quences could conceivably feed back into domestic US politics, thus affecting the social system under analysis in a way the researcher may not have controlled for in the original scenario.¶ Despite these acknowledged difficulties in using a “manipulate one variable” approach for the purpose of assaying real-world policy options, it is a useful input to the processes of building theory and research design. The best defense¶ of such an approach is that all forms of modeling involve abstractions from real- ity, and even highly unrealistic models—such as James Fearon’s famous ideal condition in which war should never occur—are useful for studying real events (Fearon 1995). Furthermore, manipulating one variable at a time is more appro- priate to some kinds of counterfactual reasoning than others. Consider the three main categories of scenario use: political narratives, game theory and formal modeling, and experimentation. The “manipulate one variable” approach seems least useful to political narratives, which often try to tackle such tough questions as “What is the future of the international system?” Although scenarios offer advantages to developing and extending theory in regard to these sorts of ques- tions, particularly in assessing key drivers and articulating world views (discussed in the next subsections), a scientific approach of controlling for various social factors is unlikely to succeed. In these projects, manipulating one variable at a time serves only to develop one of many possible futures in the interest of extending the range of the theory’s explanatory power.¶ On the other hand, the “manipulate one variable” approach offers more direct advantages for formal modeling and experimentation. The reasoning for each follows a comment made by Elinor Ostrom in her 1997 American Political Sci- ence Association presidential address. Ostrom suggested that “from...scenarios, one can proceed to formal models and empirical testing in field and laboratory settings” (Ostrom 1998). The experimental method with human subjects benefits strongly from the use of scenarios. In one study of how values factor into Ameri- cans’ economic decision making, a team of researchers sought to “attribute sig- nificant differences in average responses between conditions to the independent variables manipulated in the hypothetical scenario; that is, to the factors intuitive neorealists should weigh heavily and intuitive economists should weigh lightly” (Herrmann, Tetlock, and Diascro 2001). That is to say, one variable related to individuals’ world views could be manipulated at once in the experiment, and the researcher may test for the significance of variance between the test and con- trol groups.¶ After using scenarios to better identify variables of interest and the role of their specific values in a causal process, a third category of applications of scenario analysis to theory building is to develop new hypotheses and ways to test them. This follows from using scenarios to identify new independent variables and how their values may effect changes on the dependent variable; each new causal argu- ment may (and should) be expressed as a hypothesis to be tested in the broader research project for which the scenario analysis was developed. Additionally, “day- after” scenarios that seek to walk back the causal processes that may have led to a consequential event are particularly well suited to developing hypotheses (Holmes and Yoshihara 2008). By definition, this type of scenario analysis seeks to discover causal pathways. For instance, one might seek to chart various paths by which a particular type of social revolution may occur in a country of interest. Each narrative of how such a revolution could come to pass would result in at least one hypothesis regarding the links between the many variables of interest. These hypotheses may then be tested against historical data or used to develop new kinds of data collection methods (discussed further in the next section).¶ Finally, scenario analysis helps to explore completely new theoretical projects in a deductive way, whereas a great deal of qualitative work in political science tends to be inductive from the case study method. The use of scenario analysis may help scholars to pursue an “abductive,” or hybrid, method of theory build- ing that draws on both deductive reasoning and insights from cases (Mayer and Pirri 1995). For example, a data-poor research subject, such as how states may respond to computer network attack, has few historical precedents (Mahnken 2011; Rid 2012). If a researcher were interested in identifying the circumstances under which states are more likely to resort to violence in response to cyber¶ attack, he would be confounded by the problem that never in history has a state responded with violence to such an attack. Scenario analysis beginning with the value of violent counter-attack on the dependent variable (the DV being a state’s strategy choice) would help the researcher to deduce likely circumstances under which such an outcome may occur. Historical analysis, such as regarding other kinds of information threats, would be helpful for such a project, but the differ- ences between cyber and other kinds of information transmission would result in an incomplete causal narrative based on inductive reasoning alone.¶ Data-Poor Research Topics¶ Scenarios are a useful method for theory building and research design for topics that, despite being of high importance, lack an empirical base. The best example of this type of research is scholarship on nuclear warfare. An enormous literature evolved during the Cold War regarding how a nuclear war might be fought and how escalation dynamics might occur (Kahn 1962; Brown and Mahnken 2011). This literature was based almost exclusively on future counterfactuals, as there were no nuclear wars to study and a very low “n”—consisting of the Cuban Missile Crisis and very few other crises—for publicly acknowledged “close calls” (Sagan 1995). Indeed, in our survey of the use of scenarios in the discipline, more than 25% were about nuclear warfare. Other topics that are of high impor- tance but have a very low or zero “n” include great-power war, global epidemics, climate change, large-scale cyber attack, and weapon of mass destruction terrorism.¶ The points made earlier regarding the identification of new variables and hypotheses are relevant here. In addition to these advantages to new research topics, scenario analysis helps to identify new sources of data. This is partially because scenarios help to identify new independent variables, thus leading the researcher to think about how to measure their values, but also by helping him to think of proxies for measurement when direct observation is not possible. For instance, a day-after analysis of a scenario of interest would cause the researcher to ask what [s]he would have needed to know to predict the occurrence of the future counterfactuals and in turn help the researcher to think about ways in which the discipline could identify that low-probability process if it begins to happen in the real world.¶ Articulation of “World Views”¶ In addition to the process of building theory, scenarios are useful in helping to link theories. This is known as the articulation of a “world view,” which is a set of guiding logics for how an international system operates, such as realism, con- structivism, and neoliberal institutionalism (Doyle 1997). For any world view, one may use scenario analysis to narrate what the theory logically dictates ought to happen in the world. Similar to the benefit to theory building, but on a greater scale, this approach offers an opportunity for empirical validation of the world view over time. For instance, a scenario at a high level of abstraction, such as the structure of a political system, allows for the validation or invalidation of multiple theories and interactions of theories. Should behavior in the world fail to conform to the expectations of the world view, this of course offers scholars an opportunity to reconsider the guiding logics of their world view.¶ In the early 1990s, for example, a team of defense analysts had been tasked with developing a set of scenarios for the post–Cold War security environment (Project 2025 1994). They crafted a scenario of a future world dominated by conflict between radical Islam and the West that resembled in some key respects the current struggle against Al Qaeda and its Associated Movements. The sce- nario should not be seen as a prediction of current events, however. Rather, the¶ scenario was developed to test whether or not one could plausibly make the case for a global ideological conflict at a time when IR scholars such as Francis Fukuy- ama were arguing that ideological conflict had become a thing of the past (Fukuyama 1992). Islam appeared to be the most plausible universalist ideology that could trigger widespread conflict.¶ Another example is that a realist scholar may benefit from a scenario analysis of the likely futures of the European Union. Such an analysis would project dif- ferent possible outcomes—ranging from dissolution through more coherent for- eign policy and security integration—from basic premises consistent with the realist world view pitted against the premises of competing world views. The final section of this article offers an example of when John Mearsheimer conducted such an analysis more than 20 years ago; he developed scenarios regarding the future of Europe by comparing the expectations of offensive realism to other theoretical approaches.¶ Setting Research Agendas¶ The remainder of this section describes ways in which scenarios are useful to political scientists in ways other than developing theory. Scenarios are often used in the business and national security policy communities to have “smarter con- versations.” This use of the scenario method differs from positivist social science and instead seeks to improve knowledge through participation in scenario exer- cises. Such exercises usually involve a facilitated discussion. One way in which scenario conversations may make researchers smarter is to identify new research questions. Thinking about critical drivers of the future may help scholars to understand areas that presently have no useful theories and to avoid the ten- dency of the political science discipline to consistently focus on a small number of questions. For instance, the New Era Foreign Policy Conference, initiated by the University of California, Berkeley, and currently cosponsored by the Ameri- can University, University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University, seeks to bring together graduate students of political science to engage in scenario analy- sis and identify future research topics.8¶ Avoiding Cognitive Biases¶ In a methods book on scenarios, James Ogilvy discussed the inability of extre- mely bright people to see ahead due to cognitive biases, that is, what people found “unthinkable,” though those futures eventually came into being. In the context of discussing the future of US and USSR nuclear arsenals during a 1980s scenario exercise, Ogilvy wrote in hindsight that “two decades later we now take for granted what was then unthinkable to some very good thinkers” (Ogilvy 2002:191). This comment is very similar to an insight by Philip Tetlock that polit- ical scientists tend to view surprises as overdetermined in hindsight, but as incon- ceivable ahead of time (Weber 1996:281).¶ Scenarios, whether formally written or developed for purposes of conversation, offer a powerful way for researchers to compensate for cognitive biases endemic to any kind of human research. Scenarios do this by forcing researchers to con- front their most basic assumptions about how the world operates and by teasing out the logical implications of extreme values on the independent variables of interest. As Peter Schwartz put it,¶ “[Scenario building is] all part of a process of self-reflection: understanding your- self and your biases, identifying what matters to you, and perceiving where to put your attention. It takes persistent work and honesty to penetrate our internal mental defenses. To ensure the success of our efforts, we need a clear under- standing of the relationship between our own concerns and the wider world around us. To achieve that, it helps to have a constant stream of rich, diverse, and thought-provoking information” (Schwartz 1996:59).¶ One of the most common forms of bias that scenarios help to compensate for is an anchoring bias; that is, the tendency to interpret new information in ways that conform with our preexisting beliefs (Jervis 1976:143–202). One might also think about this as a “linear projection” bias; scholars who have a view of how the world is operating in the present (theoretically informed or not) may well project this view into the future. In addition to forcing scholars to explicitly confront these beliefs, the scenario process offers a way to think about sorting new information. A com- pleted scenario project allows a researcher to think about multiple futures (with differing plot lines for how the world arrived there) at once. Thus, new informa- tion is not automatically compared against a single linear projection into the future, but rather weighted relative to alternative futures. New information might be consistent with all hypothesized futures, in which case the new information may not lead to a new understanding. An example is the current debate regarding whether China is rising or declining relative to the United States. This literature, despite access to the same data, offers remarkably different projections regarding the future strength of each state and what this portends for the international sys- tem (Pape 2005; Layne 2009; Beckley 2011/2012; Subramanian 2011). In many cases, however, new information is likely to favor one trend line over another, thus changing how a researcher assigns probabilities to various futures.¶ Pedagogy¶ Scenarios offer many of the same benefits as simulations, recently a hot topic in the pedagological literature, to teaching in political science (Newkirk and Hamil- ton 1979; Smith and Boyer 1996; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Simpson and Kauss- ler 2009; Sasley 2010). Indeed, scenarios are often a key part of simulation learning. For instance, in a decision-making simulation in which students are assigned the roles of heads of state, the students are often offered a scenario vignette to respond to with policy choices. The emphasis of scenarios and simu- lations in pedagogy, however, is different. The literature on simulations tends to focus on experiential learning, but recent scholarship has cast some doubt on whether or not this kind of learning improves students’ knowledge of core course concepts (Raymond 2010).¶ Scenarios offer a way to make classroom exercises more explicitly oriented toward the incorporation of theories. For instance, rather than asking students to take on the roles of the President, National Security Advisor, etc., the students may be presented with a vignette and asked to analyze the strategic implications of the scenario for the United States. Both coauthors of this article have used scenarios in classroom exercises. Tom Mahnken has taught the use of scenarios for stategic planning at the Naval War College. Tim Junio used scenario exer- cises at the University of Pennsylvania. Students in the class “International Secu- rity,” having been assigned Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence and other core readings on strategy, were asked to evaluate a scenario in which the United States had committed itself to military action, but was subsequently held hostage by a foreign power.¶ In Junio’s scenario, a future US President was led to believe that due to an intel- ligence breakthrough, North Korean nuclear weapon targets were rendered¶ vulnerable to a US first strike with conventional weapons. The United States and close allies saw this as an opportunity for regime change and pre-positioned US forces in the region. The US President then issued an ultimatum to the North Korean regime to vacate the country within 48 hours, akin to the US threat to Sad- dam Hussein in 2003, or face a forceful regime change at the hands of the US-led coalition. To the surprise of US leaders, North Korea’s Supreme Leader went on television to announce that an unspecified number of nuclear warheads had been smuggled into the United States as a contingency against such a situation. The Supreme Leader then declared that any act of aggression against the North Korean people would be met with retaliation against the US homeland. Students in the class were asked to first discuss the strategic situation for the United States. What mistakes had been made to get the United States into that scenario? What issues were at stake? Then, the students were asked to apply strategic concepts to discuss how the United States might seek to extricate itself from the situation.¶ The North Korea’s blackmail scenario is an example of an extremely low-prob- ability event that almost certainly would not justify much further analysis by the intelligence and defense policy communities, but is extremely useful for peda- gogy. This kind of scenario increases student interest in the material and forces them to engage with the theories and concepts of the course. Rather than focus on policy decisions alone, as simulations are likely to do, students are forced to bring deductive logic to bear to assess the boundaries of the scenario.¶ Demonstrations of Robust Scenario Analysis¶ Mearsheimer 1990a,b¶ A widely read example of scenario analysis, though one not often considered methodologically interesting, is John Mearsheimer’s “Back to the Future: Insta- bility in Europe After the Cold War” (published more accessibly in The Atlantic as “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War”) (Mearsheimer 1990a,b). Mearshei- mer offered several scenarios of what post–Cold War Europe might look like; the one he deemed most probable suggested that Germany (and possibly others) would develop nuclear weapons and that European states would resume security competition. Mearsheimer contrasted this scenario, driven by the theoretical expectations of offensive realism, with outcomes predicted by the democratic peace and economic interdependence perspectives.¶ The dependent variable of interest in Mearsheimer’s scenario analysis was the risk of war in Europe following the end of the Cold War. His primary research question was, “Would the end of the bipolar power structure result in a higher or lower risk of war?” He considered several independent variables, including the distribution of military power (possible values: a range along a spectrum from bipolar to multipolar [unipolar perhaps being logically possible, but he does not explicitly include it as a possibility]); the character of military power, defined in terms of the distribution of nuclear weapons (possible values: aboli- tion, sustenance of existing levels, unmitigated proliferation, or mitigated prolif- eration [current nuclear powers manage their spread]); and domestic politics (possible values: degree of nationalism, ranging from high to low). Mearsheimer was explicit regarding how he believed these independent variables should effect values on his dependent variable of war proneness. Bipolar power distributions were believed to be more stable than multipolar. Nuclear weapons were expected to increase the probability of war in the first three of his four categori- cal values. High values of nationalism were expected to increase the risk of war, while low values of nationalism would reduce or keep even the risk of war.¶ The shortest formulation of Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism is that states seek to maximize their relative power. A relevant aspect of the theory¶ that Mearsheimer articulated is states’ perceptions of the costs and risks of going to war; he believed a competitive world under offensive realism might still be peaceful if the costs and risks of going to war were perceived to be high and the benefits of going to war low (Mearsheimer 1990a:12). Mearshei- mer also noted competing theoretical approaches regarding how European states were likely to behave during his analyzed time period: an international institutions perspective (IV: the strength of international institutions, ordinal), which Mearsheimer deemed irrelevant as power-seeking behavior should trump institutional concerns; democratic peace theory (IV: joint democracy, binary), which he found unpersuasive for a few reasons, including nationalism, defec- tion, and uneven spread of democracy among post-Soviet states; and pacifism (IV: binary, learned war is bad or did not), which Mearsheimer believed lacks an empirical basis.¶ Although Mearsheimer discussed these other theoretical perspectives superfi- cially, he developed a detailed account based on how he believed offensive real- ism would effect values on his three main independent variables of interest. He believed “it is certain that bipolarity will disappear, and multipolarity will emerge in the new European order” (Mearsheimer 1990a:31). He believed this because with the end of the US and Soviet spheres of influence, European states would be strongly incentivized by the anarchic character of the international system to provide for their own security. Thus, no two states were likely to emerge as clear poles in the European state system; rather, power would be diffused as many states competed with one other. Mearsheimer was highly confident in this out- come and treated it as more of a background condition than an important determinant of outcomes on his dependent variable.¶ The second two independent variables were nuclear proliferation and nation- alism. Mearsheimer viewed the most critical uncertainty regarding the future of security in Europe as the distribution and deployment patterns of nuclear weap- ons. He wrote that “the best new order would incorporate the limited, managed proliferation of nuclear weapons. This would be more dangerous than the cur- rent order, but considerably safer than 1900–1945. The worst order would be a non-nuclear Europe in which power inequalities emerge between the principal poles of power” (Mearsheimer 1990a:31). Mearsheimer offered scenarios of what it would look like if each of these outcomes resulted. Finally, Mearsheimer con- sidered the future that actually resulted, or the continuation of existing nuclear weapon ownership patterns. He argued that his theory predicted this future would not come to be, as Germany was expected to desire nuclear weapons so that they would not have to rely on Poland and Czechoslovakia to provide a bar- rier against a Soviet invasion, and because small East European states would simi- larly perceive nuclear weapons to be of the highest security interest. Nationalism was less important and factored into Mearsheimer’s analysis as an interaction effect between nuclear proliferation and nationalism that may make war more likely under some conditions.¶ In summary, Mearsheimer’s article provides an excellent example of scenario analysis being used to extend an existing theory and develop testable hypotheses that were subsequently falsified. His futures also constitute “plot lines” formed by the interaction of multiple variables of interest. Mearsheimer explained why he expected a particular outcome in Western Europe in the 1990s and why he did not expect other outcomes. The historical record clearly falsifies the hypoth- eses derived from his theory of offensive realism. Various reasons may explain why his theory was incorrect—such as normative claims, continued reliance on US security guarantees, and so on—but it is at least clear that his scenario-based approach framed a debate in a rigorous and clearly articulated way and has led to new areas of exploration for the discipline.¶ A second example of robust scenario analysis is a chapter from Keith Payne’s book The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Payne 2001). In this chapter, Payne used a scenario to demonstrate how the assumptions underlying traditional deterrence analysis, which were developed during the Cold War, may not apply to a conflict between the United States and China. Payne also used this scenario to demonstrate why in the theoretical sections of his book he emphasized some variables that traditional deterrence theorists downplay. His self-proclaimed purpose was to use a scenario analysis to test whether a more empirical approach, drawing on cultural and domestic political contexts, is more applicable to future conflicts than the deductive reasoning applied to the Cold War.¶ The dependent variable in Payne’s analysis was whether or not an adversary is deterred. He then took traditional independent variables from the existing deterrence literature and drew on extensive secondary sources to question what relaxing assumptions about the values of those variables would do to the depen- dent variable. For instance, in deductive reasoning, such factors as a state’s cul- tures (organizational and in the usual sense of tradition) are assumed to be either constant on both sides or irrelevant because other variables matter more. Payne suggested that in a particular context, these variables are not only impor- tant, but also may dominate outcomes.¶ To explain how variation in these independent variables may yield an unde- terred adversary, Payne developed an excellent “full” qualitative scenario. His pri- mary interest was Chinese decision making. The context is whether or not the United States could deter China from escalating to violent conflict during a cri- sis over the status of Taiwan. Rather than assume constant values for China on the independent variables, Payne manipulated these variables (several at once, not a “one variable at a time” approach) to show how China: is more risk toler- ant than notional adversaries in the traditional deterrence literature; considers many political issues of lower importance than the status of Taiwan; perceives it has little freedom to back down; and has difficulty understanding US demands and viewing them as credible. Factors that cause them to have these different val- ues are related to the Chinese regime’s culture and incentive structures. For instance, Payne focused on how the erosion of communist ideology has led the regime to emphasize national unity and stability as justifications for its continued hold on power, thus making the Taiwan issue of high importance. His points regarding risk tolerance come from Chinese strategic culture; Payne follows ana- lysts who place great meaning in the fact that the Chinese word for “crisis” has connotations of both danger and opportunity. Variation on all of these indepen- dent variables may, Payne argued, lead to an undeterred China, although tradi- tional deterrence theory would yield a deterred China.¶ Conclusion¶ The role of academics in policymaking is a cyclical debate in the IR subfield. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghani- stan, a vocal group has once again elevated the perspective that political science professors should be contributing to these pressing national security problems (Andres and Beecher 1989; George 1993; Putnam 2003; Monroe 2005; Nye 2009; Mead 2010). Nearly all of the discourse on “bridging the gap” between academia and the policy world emphasizes how academics may help policymak- ers, particularly with rigorous methods for testing social science hypotheses. The scenario method is one way in which political scientists may improve the policy relevance of their work. It also shows that ideas flowing in the other direction¶ are promising: the policy community and other disciplines have potential to improve the quality of political science research. The future counterfactual approach has been used by policymakers and wealth creators to improve deci- sions for decades, while our discipline has consistently relied to a great degree on the past. Thinking and writing about the future in a robust way offers politi- cal scientists an exciting opportunity to push the boundaries of current debates and to generate new ones, while also improving the processes of teaching and theory building. 2acDownload 160.34 Kb. Share with your friends:
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