The Case for an Expressive Logic of Action

Abstract

Abstract How can scholars theorize about phenomena like the eroding support, within the West, for the liberal democratic practices that once defined the post-1945 international order? Cumulative evidence shows that resentment toward out-groups shapes public attitudes toward issues like immigration and globalization, bolstering support for isolationist foreign policies in Western democracies. Yet, these findings contrast with the logics of action—based on means-end calculations, shared norms, practices, or habit—that IR scholars use to develop theory. Because existing logics provide a limited vocabulary to theorize about group processes with crucial symbolic and affective features, an important dimension of foreign policy behavior remains undertheorized. In this article, I draw on multi-disciplinary research to develop an expressive logic of action, whereby political behavior expresses an actor's social identification. Based on this logic, group attachment provides a compelling motivation for political behavior, whose activation depends on an interaction between issue framing and psychological dispositions. By focusing on the distinctive features of expressive behavior and specifying the mechanisms behind this behavior, an expressive logic encourages theory development and refinement across domains.