Transnational relations and world politics: New approach

Abstract

The past forty years has seen a marked increase in the proliferation of transnational actors in the international system. The rise of these actors has sparked a continuing debate within the field of international relations on how they influence state action. This emergent literature on ?transnational studies? within international relations has mainly pitted advocates of an approach that views states as the dominant force in world politics versus those who see the rise of transnational actors as empirical proof that the primacy of states as actors in the international system is being replaced. New literature in the mid-1990s tried to move transnational studies beyond these debates of the past. What both sides failed to grasp was that, because both looked to how transnational actors could affect domestic state behavior, they really in the end shared the same research question (it was only their approach to the question that differed). The result is a thin account of how transnational actors matter and a series of measurement problems due to the underlying concepts being much too general. This article introduces a new theoretical framework for testing the ability of transnational actors to influence domestic state behavior.