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The term constructivism encompasses several schools of thought that emphasize the role of social constructions in the study and practice of politics. Social constructions are defined as shared interpretations or ideas on how the material world is or should be ordered. Constructions are neither objective, since they exist only by virtue of being agreed on by more or less extended groups of individuals, nor subjective, given their collective nature. Rather, they are intersubjective.

Social constructions operate at the epistemological as well as the ontological level. On the one hand, they provide communities of scholars with common understandings of the reality they face; on the other hand, they are intersubjective structures influencing political life. While most, if not all, constructivists acknowledge the existence of both dimensions, they are divided as to which dimension should be assigned more weight in the analysis of political phenomena. This disagreement underlies the main cleavage in the constructivist camp—that between postmodern and modern constructivism.

Postmodern Constructivism

The most radical of the two variants, postmodern constructivism, points to the role of constructions in the so-called scientific process to attack the positivist underpinnings of mainstream political science. Positivism asserts the existence of an objective political reality whose laws can be progressively discovered through the formulation and testing of theories. For postmodern constructivists, conversely, the presence of unobservable elements in any account of politics, and the need to replace these elements with assumptions and mental constructs, makes theory building necessarily a socially laden enterprise: one in which the formulation of hypotheses on the political world hinges to a large extent on the researcher’s cultural, ideological, and political convictions. Empirical work, according to postmodern constructivists, can do very little to increase the objectivity of research. For one thing, the complexity of the sociopolitical reality, where perfect empirical tests are rare, and the ever-present possibility of formulating ad hoc explanations make it very hard, if not impossible, to disprove any theory. Second, and perhaps more important, most testing methods and procedures are themselves theory driven, and hence biased in favor of the hypotheses they are meant to evaluate.

The resulting view of science is very far from the positivist ideals of neutrality, universality, and progress. For postmodern constructivists, the subjects (i.e., researchers) and the objects of political research can never be fully separated. If there are dominant theories in certain historical periods, this is due less to their actual validity than to their consistency with prevailing cultures or professional orientations influencing scholars’ interpretation of the political reality. To the extent that any meaningful political research can exist at all, the postmodern constructivists conclude that it can only be a theoretically and methodologically “anarchic” activity, in which no approach can be deemed more “scientific” than others and, ultimately, anything goes.

Modern Constructivism

Unlike their postmodern counter parts, modern constructivists do not take their concern with the intersubjectivity of the scientific process as far as rejecting positivism altogether. While partially constructed, they contend, competing accounts of the political world are not all the same, and careful empirical research, combined with theoretical debate, can help the scholarly community distinguish between plausible and untenable explanations. At least in the long run, in sum, positivist research methods can result in a faithful depiction of the sociopolitical reality.

Far more important than the constructions of the researcher are, for modern constructivists, those of the actors of domestic and international politics: voters, leaders, parties, bureaucracies, states, and so on. In contrast to rationalist approaches, which view political actors as constantly maximizing certain stable objectives (e.g., power, wealth, security, etc.), modern constructivism argues that the nature, identity, and preferences of individual and collective agents are not fixed and exogenously given, but formed through processes of socialization that shape their interpretation of the world, define appropriate behaviors and, ultimately, influence political action. The field of nuclear proliferation provides a good illustration of the differences between rationalists and constructivists: While rationalists focus on the material side of the issue and see weapons as, in principle, equally threatening regardless of who proliferates, for constructivists the consequences of nuclear armaments on international security cannot be assessed apart from the identity of the countries involved, the nature and history of their relations, and their perception of each other.

If social constructions influence the behavior of political actors, social interactions derive, by definition, from individual actions. So, while constructivism rejects individualism— the idea that the characteristics of society stem from those of the individual agents in it—it does not embrace its opposite, holism, entirely. Rather, constructivists posit the “mutual constitution” of intersubjective structures and sociopolitical agents, in which neither part logically precedes the other. As a result, the basic coordinates of politics are always subject to (more or less gradual) change.

So defined, constructivism is more of a “thin” theoretical framework than a substantive theory of politics: It draws attention to the role of social structures in the explanation of political behavior but is compatible with different specific sources of political agents’ identities and preferences. Three such sources so far have received particular attention in the constructivist literature: culture, ideas, and institutions. Constructivists of the first branch emphasize the impact of consolidated cultural elements on the behavior of individuals, groups, and entire communities. Ideas, on the contrary, figure in many explanations of political change, which concentrate particularly on the ways in which cognitive and normative meanings are expressed and transmitted. Analyses focusing on institutions, finally, explain how certain social and political practices often acquire a self-reproductive character by shaping the worldviews and preferences of the actors involved.

Modern constructivism has acquired great popularity in Western academia in the past few decades, particularly in the subfields of comparative politics and international relations, where constructivists contribute to the main debates and have produced a substantial body of empirical work. Methodologically, constructivism is especially—though not exclusively—compatible with studies analyzing a few empirical observations (small-n studies) and inductive research strategies, which attempt to generalize from the examination of specific cases instead of using the latter to test previously formulated hypotheses. These methods allow constructivist researchers to better capture the qualitative variables they work with and to trace specific processes of agent constitution. In addition, constructivists make large use of several tools and techniques originally developed in other disciplines, such as fieldwork, participant observation, and discourse analysis. These methodological preferences have provoked the criticism of many rationalist scholars, who accuse constructivism of being unable to produce truly general and falsifiable explanations. To these allegations, constructivists respond mainly by pointing out their peculiar logic of inquiry, one that does not deny or underestimate the existence of universal social dynamics, but that is nonetheless more interested in the different and the unique in each political situation, process, or phenomenon.

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