Other studies, including Checkel’s (1999, 2003) study of citizenship norms in the EU and the Council of Europe, and Lewis’s (1998, 2003) analysis of decision-making in the EU’s Coreper, utilize qualitative rather than quantitative methods, but are similarly designed to test falsifiable hypotheses about whether, and under what conditions, EU officials are socialized into new norms, preferences, and identities.
As a result, the metatheoretical gulf separating rationalists and constructivists appears to have narrowed considerably, and EU scholars have arguably led the way in confronting and-possibly-reconciling the two theoretical approaches. Three scholars (Jupille, Caporaso, and Checkel 2003) have recently put forward a framework for promoting integration of-or at least a fruitful dialogue between-rationalist and constructivist approaches to international relations. Rationalism and constructivism, the authors argue, are not hopelessly incommensurate, but can engage each other through ‘four distinct modes of theoretical conversation’, namely:
competitive testing, in which competing theories are pitted against each other in explaining a single event or class of events;
a ‘domain of application’ approach, in which each theory is considered to explain some sub-set of empirical reality, so that, for example, utility-maximizing and strategic bargaining obtain in certain circumstances, while socialization and collective preference formation obtain in others;
a ‘sequencing’ approach, in which one theory may help explain a particular step in a sequence of actions (e. g. a constructivist explanation of national preferences) while another theory might best explain subsequent developments (e. g. a rationalist explanation of subsequent bargaining among the actors); and
‘incorporation’ or ‘subsumption’, in which one theory claims to subsume the other so that, for example, rational choice becomes a sub-set of human behaviour ultimately explicable in terms of the social construction of modern rationality.
Looking at the substantive empirical work in their special issue, Jupille, Caporaso and Checkel (2003) find that most contributions to the rationalist/constructivist debate utilize competitive testing, while only a few (see, for example, Schimmelfennig 2003a) have adopted domain of application, sequencing, or subsumption approaches.