A critical evaluation of rationalist IR in the analysis of informal institutions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article has two major inter-connected objectives about the ascendancy of informal international institutions on a global basis. The first objective is to highlight the extended scope of this phenomenon. The second objective of this article evaluates how the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature has treated the cascading wave of informal institutions. With this expansion in mind, the focus is on a critical evaluation of the rationalist institutionalist literature generally and rational design scholarship more specifically. This scholarship possesses some considerable foundational advantages. At the same time several important deficiencies stand out. First, in terms of participation, the scholarship remains excessively US-centric. Secondly, in terms of projection, the rationalist institutionalist literature lacks both historical context and an anticipatory component. Thirdly, in terms of the ‘living personality’ constitutive of informal institutions, the mode of analysis lacks nuance. Notwithstanding its claims of consistency with respect to the logic of institutionalism, the rationalist institutionalist literature is highly uneven in terms of its analysis about the nature of informal institutions. The most consistent component throughout rationalist institutionalist literature is what type of informal institutionalism is left out. Informal institutionalism is recognized to be on the ascendancy. But the core manifestation of informal institutionalism—state-based plurilateralism—is neglected in the analysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it