A central purpose of this workshop is to make these arguments more explicit and to establish their connection to our empirical knowledge about the end of the Cold War. In this vein, analysts attempt to trace the causal link between ideas and specific political outcomes, for example by assessing the proportion of variance explained by ideas as opposed to other independent variables. Ideas are thus a residual category which help to explain what interests and power alone cannot explain. A second approach holds that interests are only conceived in the context of a framework of ideas. The frameworks people use to interpret the world, and within which they define their interests, come from ideas.
Ideas define a certain set of costs and benefits.
Interests are perceived through the lens of existing ideologies in various historical settings. The question then becomes, why are these ideas adopted rather than others, why at this time and not earlier, why here and not elsewhere, and so on. Finally, a third approach goes even further to argue that the most important structures in international politics are ideational, not material. Both actor identities and interests are constituted by underlying ideational structures. That is, these ideational structures construct actor interests and identities rather than merely constrain behavior.