Michael G. Findley Daniel L. Nielson - Global shell games. Findley, Crime, and terrorism : experiments in transnational relations, crime, and terrorism

A critic of the scientific approach to international relations might wonder how much knowledge has accumulated in half a century. In the pages of World Politics in 1966, Morton Kaplan defended the scientific method as the best means of studying international relations. Taking issue with E. H. Carrs assault on science in The Twenty Years Crisis , Kaplan noted that the traditionalist asserts with little resolution. This book is an attempt to move the discussion forward.

Advocates of science as a means to understanding international politics face at least two significant challenges. First, transnational relations is, in effect, infinitely complex many millions of individuals, firms, organizations, and agencies from different countries and international organizations interact daily. Second, progress in the science of international relations requires the identification of causal effects, and observational scientific methods can only suggest correlations. The target is thus much too big, the instrument much too limited. In this book we argue that the first problem contains the answer to the second: the sheer number of transnational actors can serve as subjects in field experiments capable of revealing causal effects in international relations. The vastness of transnational interactions thus offers the means for precisely testing important theories of international relations.

We hope the book will be pathbreaking in several respects. First, it offers the most systematic and detailed evidence to date on the availability of anonymous shell corporations globally. We draw a detailed map of cross-national transparency in company formation practices derived from more than 7,400 contacts made to roughly 3,800 corporate service providers (CSPs) in 181 countries. Because the data are based on realistic requests for assistance with incorporation, they provide information gleaned from the relevant units of analysis behaving in their normal day-to-day routines. The data in this book therefore provide the most accurate picture of the issue area available.

Further, as far as we can learn, this is the first field experiment conducted on a global scale, where subjects reside in almost every country, treatment conditions involve more than a score of national jurisdictions, and the salience of international law is explicitly tested in a way that can reveal causal effects. It is also the first of what we hope will be many studies that fit what we call the experimental science of transnational relations, or Experimental TR. This broader research program probes the effects of international factors on the behavior of individuals, firms, and organizations. As noted above, these units of analysis exist in relatively large numbers, they can be practically and ethically assigned randomly to conditions, and outcomes of interest for them can be effectively measured all of which makes them ideal as research subjects in field experiments. Experimental TR thus holds out the promise of a science of international relations research based on precise estimates of causal effects.