Rationalizing politics: The emerging synthesis of international, American,and comparative politics

International relations has often been treated as a separate discipline dis tinct from the other major fields in political science, namely American and comparative politics. Amain reason for this distinction has been the claim that politics in the international system is radically different from poli tics domestically. The degree of divergence between international relations (IR) and the rest of political science has waxed and waned over the years; however, in the past decade it seems to have lessened. This process has oc curred mainly in the "rationalist research paradigm,'' and there it has bot h substantive and methodological components. Scholars in this paradigm have increasingly appreciated that politics in the international realm is not s o different from that internal to states, and vice versa. This rationalist institutionalist research agenda thus challenges two of the main assumption s in IR theory. Moreover, scholars across the three fields now tend to empl oy the same methods. The last decade has seen increasing cross-fertilizatio n of the fields around the importance of institutional analysis. Such analy sis implies a particular concern with the mechanisms of collective choice i n situations of strategic interaction. Some of the new tools in American an d comparative politics allow the complex, strategic interactions among dome stic and international agents to be understood in a more systematic and cum ulative way.