| THE WORLD political and economic stage is full of actors: nation states, multinational enterprises, domestic groups, international organizations. Interests and institutions at the subnational, national, regional, international, and supranational levels contend for influence. |
| It is not surprising that the manifest complexity of the international political economy has been matched by a confusing array of analytical perspectives on how best to understand it. The easy path is to insist on the incorporation of all elements of the global environment, on the undeniable basis that everything matters. This, of course, makes explanation impossible, for the goal of explanation is to clarify which factors are important in what circumstances. |
| Scholars turn to analytical remedies in their attempts to understand the intricacies of international politics. One of the earliest such remedies was to abstract a way from the perplexing domestic political characteristics of individual nations and simply to assume that all countries are alike. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and analogous assumptions have been very helpful in thinking about individuals and firms in markets, about genes and populations in evolution, and about matters in other realms of social inquiry. In political science, too, modeling states as unitary actors has provided many important insights into the causes and consequences of relations among nations. This method has helped illuminate problems of interstate cooperation, patterns of global economic relations, varieties of international organizations, and other topics.1 |
| The unitary-state approach is especially useful for examining the strategic setting within which similar nation states interact and how that setting affects their behavior and the outcomes of their behavior. To the extent that the number of states involved, the informational environment, or other characteristics of the strategic setting have an important |
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