Table 1.1 Organization of Part II—Major Levels of Analysis in FPA
Every theoretical discipline has a ground. A “ground” means the conceptualization of the fundamental or foundational level at which phenomena in the field of study occur. So, for example, the ground of physics is now that of matter and antimatter particles. Economists often use the ground of firms or households. It is upon such ground that theories are built, modified, and even discarded. Sometimes just the knowledge that the ground exists frees the researcher from having to anchor his or her work in it, permitting greater heights of abstraction to be reached. A physicist can work on problems related to black holes, and economists can speak of trends in world markets without having to begin each new research effort by going over the ground of their respective disciplines.
International Relations (IR) as a field of study has a ground, as well. All that occurs between nations and across nations is grounded in human decisionmakers acting singly or in groups. In a sense, the ground of IR is thus the same ground of all the social sciences. Understanding how humans perceive and react to the world around them, and how humans shape and are shaped by the world around them, is central to the inquiry of social scientists, even those in IR.
However, your previous training in IR probably gave you the impression that states are the ground of International Relations. Or, in a slightly alternative language, that whatever decisionmaking unit is involved, be it a state or a human being or a group of humans, that that unit can be modeled as a unitary rational actor and therefore be made equivalent to the state. Sometimes this approach is referred to as “black-boxing” the state, or as a “billiard ball model” of state interaction. You may have even been taught that IR is not the study of foreign policymaking.
Alas, dear students, you have been taught amiss.
If you are taking this course, then someone in your department feels that the ground of IR is human decisionmakers who are not best approximated as strictly unitary rational actors, and who are not equivalent to the state. And, furthermore, that “the state” is a metaphysical abstraction that is useful as a shorthand for IR’s ground, but cannot be a realistic conceptualization of it. In this course, you are entering a realm of IR theory that you may have never been exposed to otherwise; remember to thank your professor for this opportunity.
If the ground of IR is human decisionmakers acting singly or in groups, several other theoretical hallmarks follow naturally and serve to characterize Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA).
The explanandum, or that which is to be explained or understood, will be decisions taken by human decisionmakers with reference to or having known consequences for entities external to their nation-state. Such decisions entail action, inaction, and even indecision. Usually such decisions directly target external entities in the form of influence attempts (even influence in the first place of domestic actors), but they may include decisions that target domestic entities but have ramifications for external entities. One is almost always examining not a single decision, but a constellation of decisions taken with reference to a particular situation. Indeed, as Brighi and Hill note, “Foreign policy decisions should be seen primarily as heightened moments of commitment in a perpetual process of action, reaction, and further action at many different levels and involving a range of different actors” (2012, 166). Furthermore, decisions may be modified over time, requiring an examination of sequences of decisions. Furthermore, the stages of decisionmaking may also be the focus of inquiry, from problem recognition, framing, and perception to more advanced stages of goal prioritization, contingency planning, and option assessment. Last, FPA traditionally finds itself most interested in decisions taken by human decisionmakers in positions of authority to commit the resources of the nation-state, though it is quite possible to analyze decisionmakers who do not hold such positions.
Indeed, the only things not examined are likely to be accidents or mistakes, or decisions that cannot be conceptualized as having an international component. In the first case, the action was not purposeful. It is difficult to explain nonpurposeful action, though mistakes can in some cases be approached through psychological or bureaucratic politics frameworks. In the case where there is no international component, the decision can be analyzed, but probably would not be analyzed by foreign policy analysts, but rather by domestic policy analysts. Though some have opined that “in conditions of globalization, all politics has become foreign policy in one way or the other,” there is still a meaningful distinction to be made (Brighi and Hill, 2012, 153). Even if one were to concede that point, which we are not inclined to do, the same conceptual and methodological tools used in FPA would still be useful in examining non-foreign policy decisions. That is, what you learn in FPA may help you to analyze human decisionmaking regardless of substantive focus.
In the world of foreign policy, however, the actual decisions (or indecisions) made may not be immediately observable to the analyst. Indeed, they may be secret and may remain so for decades due to national security concerns. In many cases, this means the analyst is working with historical data, or contemporary data insofar as public sources provide that information (which may be incomplete or even false). Another approach is to use artifacts of decisions—the traces that decisions to act leave in newspapers or chronologies, and which are eventually concatenated into histories. These artifacts are termed “events,” and the data produced by accumulating them are called “events data.” (We will examine events data in more detail in a following section of this chapter.)
This distinction between the foreign policy decision and the foreign policy action bears additional discussion. The distinction is worth making for several reasons. First, a given decision may never result in action; indeed, there may be a decision taken not to act, or there may be insufficient consensus among the members of the decisionmaking group to act. While leaving no action artifact, such decisions are as likely to be as important as decisions to act and well worth analyzing (for an example of such a case, see Haney, 1997). Second, a decision may be taken to act in a way that does not reveal, and indeed, is possibly designed to conceal, the true decision taken. Such deceptions, insincerities, and concealments are quite common in foreign policy. The Soviets stated they had shut down their biological weapons program after signing the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), but in fact such a program persisted even past the demise of the USSR and perhaps continues to this very day (Alibek and Handelman, 1999). Last, implementation issues routinely plague even the most important decisions to act, often leading to profound slippage between the direction of the decision taken and the direction of the action executed. These issues of implementation may be logistical and unintentional; on the other hand, they may be political and purely intentional on the part of subordinates or other actors. Furthermore, the coordination of policy in different policy areas may be lacking, resulting in policies in one area seemingly contradictory to policies in another, such as the United States’ tacit economic support of the anti-American Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela. Multilateral foreign policy initiatives, of course, are very vulnerable to implementation misdirection. As Brighi and Hill put it, “The implementation of policy making always involves some loss of momentum through transaction costs, political friction and disillusion” (2012, 166).
A focus on the decision may also be more prudent because, in addition to the distinction between decision and action, there is also a distinction to be made between decision and outcome. Every foreign policy decision is meant to achieve its aims; however, complete success is extremely rare, and there is a spectrum of achievement ranging from mostly successful to unintentionally provoking the precise opposite reaction to what was anticipated or intended. Operation Iraqi Freedom was meant to achieve many admirable things; it is hard to see that it has achieved much more than the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Adding a further level, the broader consequences of the outcome of Iraqi Freedom has already haunted U.S. foreign policymakers as they faced the rise of the ISIS Caliphate in Iraq and Syria and may continue to haunt for decades to come. Decisionmakers must make foreign policy decisions knowing they cannot fully control either the outcome or the longer-range consequences of the actions or inactions that flow from those decisions.
The explanans of FPA are those factors that influence foreign policy decisionmaking and foreign policy decisionmakers. The totality of such influence factors is overwhelming: for example, some studies have shown decisionmaking to be affected by the color of the room in which the decision is made! (Jens, 2017). From its inception, critiques of FPA have centered around the impossibility of tracing all influences on a given decision, or even on decisionmaking in the abstract. Here, for example, is a critique from over forty years ago, which seems as contemporary today as when it was written:
The inordinate complexity of [FPA] as it has so far been outlined is unquestionably its greatest shortcoming, one which in the end many prove its undoing… . A research design that requires an investigator to collect detailed information about such diverse matters as the social system, the economy, the foreign situation, the actors, the perceptions, the motivations, the values, the goals, the communication problems, the personality—in short, that asks him to account for a decision making event virtually in its totality—places a back-breaking burden upon him, one that he could never adequately accomplish even if he were willing to invest an exorbitant effort. If the mere magnitude of the task does not frighten him off, he is likely to be discouraged by the unrewarding prospect of having to collect data about a great number of variables whose relative importance he can only guess at and whose influence he cannot easily measure in any event. (McClosky, 1962, 201)
Such criticism has been used to justify the move to use the nation-state or other abstractions as the principal actor in the study of IR. After all, if FPA research is too difficult, alternative traditions of theorizing must come to the fore. It has also been used as a reason to marginalize scholarship that retains use of the human decisionmaker as its theoretical focus. If most IR scholarship treats the nation-state or similar abstractions as the ground, then most IR scholarship will begin to feel incommensurable with FPA scholarship. As Carlnaes puts it, “Foreign policy is neither fish nor fowl in the study of politics,” and this sense of uneasy fit has been with the field since its inception (2012, 113).
However, it is my contention that this state of affairs is not inevitable and should be rethought, for the original critique of FPA’s complexity is not completely accurate. It is true that two of the hallmarks of FPA scholarship are that it views the explanation of foreign policy decisionmaking as multifactorial, with the desideratum of examining variables from more than one level of analysis (multilevel). Explanatory variables from all levels of analysis, from the most micro to the most macro, are of interest to the analyst to the extent that they affect decisionmaking. As a result, insights from many intellectual disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, organizational behavior, anthropology, economics, and so forth, will be useful for the foreign policy analyst in efforts to explain foreign policy decisionmaking, making multi-/interdisciplinarity a third hallmark of FPA. Thus, of all subfields of IR, FPA is the most radically integrative theoretical enterprise, which is its fourth hallmark, for it integrates a variety of information across levels of analysis and spans numerous disciplines of human knowledge.
It is also true that the ground of the human decisionmaker leads us toward an emphasis on agent-oriented theory, this being a fifth hallmark of FPA. States are not agents because states are abstractions and thus have no agency. Only human beings can be true agents. Going further, FPA theory is also profoundly actor specific in its orientation (to use a term coined by Alexander George, 1993), unwilling to “black-box” the human decisionmakers under study. The humans involved in the Cuban missile crisis, for example, were not interchangeable generic rational utility maximizers and were not equivalent to the states that they served. Not just general and abstract information, but specific and concrete information about the decisionmakers in all three countries (the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba) would be necessary to explain that crisis. Actor specificity, then, is FPA’s sixth hallmark. The perspective of FPA is that the source of all international politics and all change in international politics is specific human beings using their agency and acting individually or in groups.
It is not true that FPA is impossible as a theoretical task. And it is not true that state-centered IR theory and human decisionmaker-oriented FPA theory are incommensurable. In fact, I will argue that FPA cannot be impossible, for one of the consequences of this would be that IR could not exist as a field of social science scholarship. And if FPA is integral to the IR endeavor, then state-centered IR theory and FPA theory cannot be incommensurable. Furthermore, FPA offers a real grounding of IR theory, which provides real value in IR theorizing, as we shall explore.
The single most important contribution of FPA to IR theory is to identify the point of theoretical intersection between the most important determinants of state behavior: material and ideational factors. The point of intersection is not the state; it is human decisionmakers.
If our IR theories contain no human beings, they will erroneously paint for us a world of no change, no creativity, no persuasion, no accountability. And yet virtually none of our mainstream IR theories over the decades of the Cold War placed human beings in the theoretical mix. Adding human decisionmakers as the key theoretical intersection confers some advantages generally lacking in IR theory. Let us explore each in turn.
First, theories at different levels of analysis can finally be integrated in a meaningful fashion. As R. Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin put it over forty years ago,
The central concept of decision-making may provide a basis for linking a group of theories which hitherto have been applicable only to a segment of international politics or have not been susceptible of application at all… . By emphasizing decision-making as a central focus, we have provided a way of organizing the determinants of action around those officials who act for the political society. Decision makers are viewed as operating in dual-aspect setting so that apparently unrelated internal and external factors become related in the actions of the decision-makers. (1962, 74, 85)
There are quite a number of well-developed theoretical threads in IR, studying such phenomena as institutions, systems, group dynamics, domestic politics, and so forth. Often we refer to the “two-level” game that state decisionmakers must play: the simultaneous play of the game of domestic politics and the game of international politics (Putnam, 1988). The formidable task of weaving these threads together has been stymied by the insistence on retaining the state as a “metaphysical” actor. If one replaces metaphysics with a more realistic conceptualization of the “actor,” the weaving becomes feasible, though certainly still complex.
In addition, other types of theory that have not been well developed in IR, such as a theory of how cultural factors and social constructions within a culture affect state behavior, can now be attempted with a greater probability of success. It was not until the 1990s that serious work on this subject by IR scholars became more accepted as informing the major theoretical questions of the discipline (e.g., P. Katzenstein, 1996; Lapid and Kratochwil, 1996; Hudson, 1997). Only a move toward placing human decisionmakers at the center of the theoretical matrix would allow the theorist to link to the social constructions present in a culture.
The engine of theoretical integration in IR, then, is the definition of the situation created by the human decisionmakers.
The second major advantage conferred is the possibility of incorporating a more robust concept of agency into IR theory. Scholars in IR have struggled with the “agent-structure” problematique for some time now (Wight, 2006). Though no final resolution will ever be accepted, as this is a perennial philosophical conundrum, what is accepted is that IR theory, with its emphasis on states, institutions, and system structure, currently provides much more insight into structure than agency. This is a severe theoretical handicap, for to lack a robust concept of the “agent” in IR means to be at a disadvantage when trying to explain or project significant change and noteworthy creativity. In FPA, we often speak of the concept of “foreign policy substitutability” (Most and Starr, 1986); that is to say, for any possible combination of material and structural conditions, there will still be variability in resulting foreign policy. FPA’s agent-oriented and actor-specific theory is crucial to explaining that variability. Furthermore, it is very difficult to grapple with the issue of accountability in international affairs if the theoretical language cannot, in a realistic fashion, link acts of human agency in that realm to the consequences thereof. That a standing international court to try individuals for crimes against humanity now exists suggests that the broader world community hungers after ideational frameworks that manifest the agency embedded in international affairs. Work in FPA empowers IR scholars to make an appreciated contribution in that regard.
The third major advantage is to move beyond description or postulation of natural law–like generalizations of state behavior to a fuller and more satisfying explanation for state behavior that requires an account of the contributions of human beings. Again, as it was put decades ago by some of the founding fathers of FPA,
We believe that the phenomena normally studied in the field of international politics can be interpreted and meaningfully related by means of [the decision-making approach] as we shall present it. It should be clearly understood that this is not to say that all useful work in the field must or can be done within the decision-making framework… . However, and the qualification is crucial, if one wishes to probe the “why” questions underlying the events, conditions, and interaction patterns which rest upon state action, then decision-making analysis is certainly necessary. We would go so far as to say that the “why” questions cannot be answered without analysis of decision making. (R. Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin, 1962, 33; emphasis in original)
Social science is unlike the physical sciences in that what is analyzed possesses agency. Neither description of an act of agency, nor assertion that natural law was operative in a particular case as a member of a class, can fully satisfy, for we know that agency means the agent could have acted otherwise. What is required is almost an anthropology of IR that delves into such agency-oriented concepts as motivation, emotion, and problem representation. Indeed, much of the early empirical work in FPA (see, for example, R. Snyder and Paige, 1958) does resemble a more anthropological or “verstehen” approach. It may be for this reason that bridges seem more easily built between FPA and constructivist schools of IR than, say, between FPA and neorealist schools (Boekle et al., 2001; Kubalkova, 2001; Houghton, 2007; Browning, 2008). Interestingly, one school of realism that has emerged in recent years—neoclassical realism—is also relatively close in its theoretical orientation to FPA, providing a very natural bridge (Lobell et al., 2009). Still another set of bridges is being built by non–North American FPA scholars, for their work grows out of sometimes quite different IR contexts than that of the United States. We will discuss all these theoretical connections in more detail in chapter 7.
Some would argue that this agent-oriented methodological approach proves unworkable for IR scholars. It might be true that if such research cannot be performed, then the state of current IR theory makes sense: abstractions are of necessity at the heart of our theories, agency vanishes, and to the extent that we speak of the power of ideational forces, we can only speak of them in a vague way, as if they were elusive mists that float through the theoretical landscape. But a rebuttal could be as follows: even if only a few IR scholars are willing to undertake FPA-type agent-specific work, it salvages the entire enterprise of IR theorizing from irrelevance and vacuity. One can justify using shorthand if there is a full language underlying that use. We can justify theoretical shorthand in IR (e.g., using the metaphysical state as an actor) if we understand what spelling our sentences out in the underlying language would look like and what the meaning of those sentences would be in that fuller language. If someone is willing to write in the full language, we can still translate the shorthand. It is only if the shorthand completely replaces the fuller language that we are truly impoverished in a theoretical sense in IR. It is when we stop wincing slightly when the abstraction of the state is used as a theoretical actor, when we feel fully comfortable with the omission of the real human actors behind the abstraction, that we have lost something profoundly important in IR.
An analogous situation is observable in the field of economics. Existing economic theories were insufficient to foresee the recession of 2008. Some have opined this was the case because economics had not paid adequate attention to its microfoundations, preferring instead the parsimony and elegance of mathematical theorizing. But just as we are arguing with respect to International Relations, insufficient attention to the microfoundations inevitably leads to lacunae that produce theoretical failure to account for change and discontinuity. In sum, what was lacking was agent-based models. A new effort to reconceptualize the linkage between micro and macroeconomics is afoot, and interestingly, involves “install[ing] biologists, anthropologists, and physicists alongside economists and policymakers” (Nelson, 2018). We take from this that there must be room in every discipline for those who attend to the microfoundations of agency, and that the overall theoretical project of any social science discipline must be informed by work at that level. FPA plays that role for IR.
The fourth major benefit derived from FPA research is that it is not only a bridge to other IR traditions but often a natural bridge from IR to non-IR fields, such as Comparative Politics and public policy. FPA’s ability to speak to domestic political constraints and contexts provides a common language between FPA and Comparative Politics. Indeed, some of the most interesting FPA work in recent years has featured teams of FPA theorists and country or regional experts collaborating on specific theoretical projects (International Studies Review, special issue Summer 2001). Similarly, FPA research also shares a common language with public policy researchers. FPA’s focus on decisionmaking allows for a fairly free exchange, but one that needs more explicit emphasis (George, 1993; see Brummer et al., 2019, for a formal opening of that dialogue).
In sum, then, the existence of FPA scholarship provides several important benefits to the field of IR, many of which are only now beginning to become apparent to more mainstream IR researchers.
Let’s get a glimpse of such benefits through an example touching on the work of two IR theorists with whose work most IR students of the contemporary period are familiar. Let’s examine the debate between the neorealist work of Kenneth Waltz (1979) and the social constructivist work of Alexander Wendt (1999). In Waltz’s neorealism, states are very much the archetypal black boxes, whose preferences are shaped primarily by power distributions within the anarchic system of states. This is somewhat ironic, given Waltz’s first important book, Man, the State, and War (1959) delineated the usefulness of First Image (individual), Second Image (state), and Third Image (system) explanations of state behavior. In the space of twenty years, Waltz left the First and Second Images behind. In his 1979 view, foreign policy revolves, therefore, around achieving balance or dominance in power, depending on one’s own material capabilities. Because system-imposed interests will be paramount in a nation’s reckoning, there is little need or desire to unpack that black box of decisionmaking and decisionmakers. Wendt, on the other hand, contends that ideas construct preferences and interests; that is, the material world is what the ideal world makes of it. Of course, it is not “ideas all the way down,” for there is a material reality ruling out certain ideas somewhere: for example, landlocked Malawi is never going to be a naval power. Assuming that obvious material bedrock, then, a focus on ideational social constructs at the state and system levels, with their production and reproduction, should explain everything neorealism and neoliberalism can explain and more that they cannot, according to Wendt. In some specified situations, neorealism and neoliberalism can be used as more parsimonious shortcuts, but you could not know what those situations would be in advance of a social constructivist analysis.
The beauty of Wendt’s approach is twofold: first, you can have a system change without a material change (the system change would be based on ideational change, which was very important to introduce in IR theory once the Cold War ended), and second, arguably materially dissimilar states can act similarly, and arguably materially similar states can act dissimilarly, depending on their ideationally constructed identities within the state system (also helpful in this era of almost two hundred state entities with a dizzying variety of behavior). In a sense, the differences between Waltz and Wendt touch upon the agent-structure problematique, that is, whether structures, defined objectively, are primary shapers of system behavior (Waltz), or whether state actors help shape the structures and resultant behavior through their intersubjective understandings (Wendt). It is to Wendt’s credit that he pointed out that the new clothes have no emperor (i.e., that structuralist IR theories have a woefully inadequate conception of the role of ideational social constructs), and that he helped initiate this round of the agent-structure debate in IR theory.
But there is more to say on the matter than what Waltz and Wendt have said. There is an FPA-oriented critique that applies not only to the billiard ball world of Waltz’s states but also to Wendt’s world of ideational forces, as well. That FPA critique is simple: only human beings have ideas. Only human beings can create identities, only human beings can change identities, only human beings can act on the basis of identity. Only humans can be socialized or socialize others. Only humans are agents in international relations. It isn’t “ideas all the way down”; it is human agents all the way down, standing on the material bedrock noted above, sprouting ideas, persuading each other of the value of those ideas and attempting to transmit them forward in time through processes such as institutionalization. When you drop those humans out, as arguably both Waltz and Wendt have done, you are left with a machine. Waltz dropped both humans and their ideas out of the mix, and he is left with a deterministic machine that cannot change without material change. Wendt only dropped humans, but not ideas, from his mix: curiously, he, too, is left with a machine—a machine that trumpets the possibility of change while being incapable of it. An FPA critique would suggest that Wendt and Waltz have no adequate conceptualization of agency at all.
In a way, this is more of a problem for Wendt than it is for Waltz, for Wendt claims to have developed a theory of how agents and structures co-construct one another, whereas Waltz is only interested in structure’s causal effects on patterns of behavior in the system. Waltz never wanted agents (at least by 1979); Wendt says he has incorporated ideational factors, but without theoretically incorporating the only beings capable of possessing them.
Why is this a problem? It is only a problem in relation to your explanatory ends. For Waltz, it is a problem for all the reasons Wendt says it is. Waltz simply cannot explain the range of behavior that Wendt can. As Gideon Rose, a neoclassical realist, succinctly puts it, “Realism … is a theoretical hedgehog: it knows one big thing, that systemic forces and relative material power shape state behavior… . Yet people who cannot move beyond the system will have difficulty explaining most of what happens in international relations” (1998, 165). And as John Vasquez maintains, the deductive inferences from neorealism come to resemble a vast definitional tautology in which everything—and nothing—can be explained (1997). In terms of the aims of explanation in any field, though neorealism might give us some small satisfaction for the first aim (how am I to understand what is going on?), it offers very little for the second (what’s going to happen in the future?), and nothing for the third (what can I, or any of us, do to influence international relations in a desired direction?). Eventually, when you leave out both humans and their ideas in social science—and insist on theoretical autonomy from theories that leave them in—you end up with theory that cannot inform practice, theory fits only for the intellectual jousts of academic journals. This is theory that measures the size of the cage you are trapped in, explaining just how appropriate the title of John Mearsheimer’s 2001 neorealist tome, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, really was.
For Wendt, the problem is more nuanced. By leaving in ideas, but omitting human agents, he leaves ideas in the realm of the untouchable zeitgeist. (Indeed, it is interesting to think of Wendt playing Hegel to Waltz’s Marx.) The ideas are there, but they have no handles for us to hold and turn, due in large part to what Colin Wight has noted: “The state may not be an agent at all but a structure” (1999, 136). More specifically:
Jeffrey Checkel rightly notes, “Without more sustained attention to agency, [constructivist] scholars will find themselves unable to explain where their powerful social structures come from in the first place, and, equally important, why and how they change over time. Without theory, especially at the domestic level, constructivists will not be able to explain in a systematic way how social construction actually occurs or why it varies cross-nationally” (1998, 339). Though we could discuss each of the above three points of inadequacy, let us just take the last, for its importance is greater than a first glance would suggest. The end of the Cold War allowed for the constructivist turn in IR because it was apparent that you could get meaningful change in the system absent any material change. (Of course, diehard neorealists answer that there was no meaningful change in the system, but since this stance puts them outside the pale of common sense, this serves only to open the window wider for alternative approaches [Waltz, 2000]). Something ideational had to be going on.
The salient theoretical question then becomes: How is it that ideas can change the behavior of agents? Wendt spends an entire chapter of his book (1999), ironically titled “Process and Structural Change,” evading this very question. He discusses how four master variables might facilitate such a change but admits tacitly that the effect of these variables cannot take place in the absence of “ideological labor” (1999, 352). According to Wendt, such labor must be undertaken volitionally, and may have to be continued in the face of no reciprocity by others in the system of interaction. Someone has to trust first; someone has to restrain himself first; someone has to conceptualize a common fate first; someone has to read the other’s mind first before any mutually constituting behavior can derive from interaction between states. Throughout the chapter, Wendt speaks of “leadership,” “bright ideas” (347), framing “entrepreneurs” (353), “ideological labor” (352), imagining of “communities” (355). But states are not in a position to do any such things—which is why Wendt is left with these generally agent-obscuring circumlocutions to explain how change really does occur. But these contortionist’s moves only cause us to see what he would rather we not, which is: only human agents working through a state apparatus can do something first in a state system.
Wight hits the nail on the head:
Wendt advocates a structurationist solution to the agent-structure problem at the level of the state and state system, and a structuralist solution at the level of the individual and the state… . But the state, as a constructed social form, can only act in and through individual action. State activity is always the activity of particular individuals acting within particular social forms… . None of this is to deny of a common intention, or collective action, which individuals try to realize in their practices. Nor is this to deny the reality of social structures that enable common action. Nor does denial of the “state-as-agent” thesis entail that there can be no common and coordinated action which is a bearer of causal powers greater than that possessed by individuals acting individually. But such causal power that does emerge as a result of the cooperative practices of collectives can only be accessed by individuals acting in cooperation with others… . The theory of the state articulated by the agent-structure writers, on the other hand, neglects these points and there is no space for human agency. (1999, 128)
This is a special handicap for Wendt, who aspires to a reflexive practice of IR, that is, “the possibility of thinking self-consciously about what direction to go in” (1999, 375). He hopes there can be “engineering” or “steering” of the states system, a “design orientation to international life … which would give students of facts and students of values in world politics something to talk about” (1999, 376–77). But how can his theory in its current formulation bring us closer to such a realization? After all, there is no ghostly Structural Engineer; there is no ghostly Structural Steering Force—in the end, there is only us. There is only human agency. Theories that pull a veil over that human agency hurt our ability to go in a preferred value direction. Such theories impoverish our agency, for they blind us to its reality and its power. FPA-style theories provide a helpful corrective to this theoretical conundrum.
For example, consider research by Barbara Farnham that testifies to this real power of human agency. Farnham’s work concerns the Reagan side of the ideational change that finished the Cold War. (The quotes that follow are all from Farnham, 2002.) IR scholars such as Jeffrey Checkel have illuminated the intra-Russian politics of the time, and he is able to point out to us which actual human beings in which role positions chose to become policy entrepreneurs, and how their activities affected Mikhail Gorbachev (Checkel, 1993). Farnham takes the U.S. side of the story, showing that none of Reagan’s core beliefs prepared him to trust Gorbachev. Indeed, many of his closest advisors who shared those beliefs never would. Only Reagan himself was willing to trust first. From the Moscow summit of 1988, we hear Reagan say, “Systems can be brutish, bureaucrats may fail. But men can sometimes transcend all that, transcend even the forces of history that seem destined to keep them apart.” We hear him comment, “Perhaps the deepest impression I had during this experience and other meetings with Soviet citizens was that they were generally indistinguishable from people I had seen all my life on countless streets in America.”
For Gorbachev, the emotions ran equally deep. Farnham says, “Years later, Edmund Morris asked Gorbachev what he saw when he looked up into Ronald Reagan’s eyes [the first time]. ‘Sunshine and clear sky… . At once I felt him to be a very authentic human being.’ ” The translator tries to explain further that the Russian term Gorbachev used means “someone of great strength of character who rings true, all the way through to his body and soul… . He has—‘Kalibr,’ said Gorbachev, who has been listening intently.” Gorbachev further explained to the Politburo,
In Washington, perhaps for the first time, we understood so clearly how important the human factor is in international politics… . For us, Reagan appeared as a representative of and a spokesman for the most conservative part of the most conservative segment of American capitalism and the military-industrial complex. But … policymakers … also represent purely human qualities, the interests and aspirations of common people, and that they can be guided by purely normal human feeling and aspirations… . This is an important aspect of the new international thinking, and it has now produced results. (authors’ emphasis)
How is it that accounting for human agency is not an important aspect of the new International Relations thinking? Our IR data is impregnated through and through with human agency—how is it we do not feel obliged to include it in our theories, even after we have seen its spectacular power displayed right before our very eyes so recently? What else could IR be for? When we reflect on actors and structures, is it not plain that, as Hill says, “Their interaction is a dynamic process, leading to the constant evolution of both actors and structures”? (2003, 28). That, in a nutshell, is why FPA exists, and why it must exist as an integral part of IR theory.
What are the origins of FPA? In one sense, FPA-style work has been around as long as there have been historians and others who have sought to understand why national leaders have made the choices they did regarding interstate relations. But FPA-style work within the field of International Relations per se is best dated back to the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Three paradigmatic works arguably built the foundation of Foreign Policy Analysis:
The work of Richard Snyder and his colleagues inspired researchers to look below the nation-state level of analysis to the players involved:
We adhere to the nation-state as the fundamental level of analysis, yet we have discarded the state as a metaphysical abstraction. By emphasizing decision-making as a central focus we have provided a way of organizing the determinants of action around those officials who act for the political society. Decision-makers are viewed as operating in dual-aspect setting so that apparently unrelated internal and external factors become related in the actions of the decision-makers. Hitherto, precise ways of relating domestic factors have not been adequately developed. (R. Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin, 1954, 53)
In taking this approach, Snyder and his colleagues bequeathed to FPA its characteristic emphasis on foreign policy decisionmaking (FPDM) as opposed to foreign policy outcomes. Decisionmaking was best viewed as an “organizational behavior,” by which the basic determinants would be spheres of competence of the actors involved, communication and information flow, and motivations of the various players. Desirable explanations would thus be both multicausal and interdisciplinary.
James Rosenau’s pre-theorizing encouraged scholars to systematically and scientifically tease out cross-nationally applicable generalizations about nation-state behavior:
To identify factors is not to trace their influence. To understand processes that affect external behavior is not to explain how and why they are operative under certain circumstances and not under others. To recognize that foreign policy is shaped by internal as well as external factors is not to comprehend how the two intermix or to indicate the conditions under which one predominates over the other… . Foreign policy analysis lacks comprehensive systems of testable generalizations… . Foreign policy analysis is devoid of general theory. (1966, 98–99)
General, testable theory was needed, and the intent of Rosenau’s article was to point in the direction it lay. However, the general theory Rosenau advocated was not the grand theory of Cold War IR: the metaphor Rosenau used in this work is instructive in this regard—FPA researchers should emulate Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, who was able to discern genotype from phenotype in plants through careful observation and comparison. Are there genotypes of nation-states, a knowledge of which would confer explanatory and predictive power on our models of foreign policy interaction? What Rosenau was encouraging was the development of middle-range theory, that is, theory that mediated between grand principles and the complexity of reality. At the time Rosenau wrote this article, he felt the best way to uncover such midrange generalizations was through aggregate statistical exploration and confirmation. Rosenau also underscored the need to integrate information at several levels of analysis—from individual leaders to the international system—in understanding foreign policy. As with Snyder, the best explanations would be multilevel and multicausal, integrating information from a variety of social science knowledge systems.
Harold and Margaret Sprout contributed to the formation of the field by suggesting that understanding foreign policy outputs, which they associated with the analysis of power capabilities within an interstate system, without reference to foreign policy undertakings, which they associated with strategies, decisions, and intentions, was misguided. “Explanations of achievement and estimations of capabilities for achievement invariably and necessarily presuppose antecedent undertakings or assumptions regarding undertakings. Unless there is an undertaking, there can be no achievement—and nothing to explain or estimate” (1965, 225). To explain undertakings, one needs to look at the psycho-milieu of the individuals and groups making the foreign policy decision. The psycho-milieu is the international and operational environment or context as it is perceived and interpreted by these decisionmakers. Incongruities between the perceived and the real operational environments can occur, leading to less than satisfactory choices in foreign policy. The sources of these incongruities were diverse, requiring once again multicausal explanations drawing from a variety of fields. Even in these early years, the Sprouts saw a clear difference between Foreign Policy Analysis and what we have called actor-general theory:
Instead of drawing conclusions regarding an individual’s probable motivations and purposes, his environmental knowledge, and his intellectual processes linking purposes and knowledge, on the basis of assumptions as to the way people are likely on the average to behave in a given social context, the cognitive behavioralist—be he narrative historian or systematic social scientist—undertakes to find out as precisely as possible how specific persons actually did perceive and respond in particular contingencies. (1965, 118)
The message of these three works was powerful in its appeal to certain scholars: the particularities of the human beings making national foreign policy were vitally important to understanding foreign policy decisions. Such particularities should not remain as undigested idiosyncrasies (as in traditional single-country studies), but rather be incorporated as instances of larger categories of variation in the process of cross-national middle-range theory building. Multiple levels of analysis, ranging from the most micro to the most macro, should ideally be integrated in the service of such theory. The stores of knowledge of all the social sciences must be drawn upon in this endeavor. The process of foreign policymaking was at least as important as the foreign policy decision itself. The substance of this message was and continues to be the “hard core” of FPA.
Other parts of the message were more temporally bounded. As we shall see, certain methodological stances that perhaps seemed self-evident in the early 1960s would not stand the test of time. These would engender troubling paradoxes that would plague the field and lead to a temporary decline in some areas in the mid- to late 1980s until they were satisfactorily resolved. Despite these paradoxes, the first bloom of FPA, lasting from the late 1960s to the aforementioned decline, was a time of great intellectual effort and excitement.
The energy and enthusiasm of the first generation of work in FPA (1954–1973) were tremendous. Great strides in conceptualization, along with parallel efforts in data collection and methodological experimentation, were the contributions of this time period. Since the first edition of this volume, a number of our best first-generation FPA scholars have passed away, such as Alexander George, Harold Guetzkow, Hayward Alker, Arnold Kanter, Glenn Snyder, and James Rosenau. The second generation of work from about 1974 to 1993 expressly built upon those foundations. Though it is always difficult to set the boundaries of a field of thought, the overview that follows includes a representative sampling of classic works in the first and second generations that both examined how the “specifics” of nations led to differences in foreign policy choice/behavior and put forward propositions in this regard that at least have the potential to be generalizable and applicable cross-nationally (see also Carlnaes and Guzzini, 2011).
Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin had emphasized the process and structure of groups making foreign policy decisions (Snyder extended his work with case studies in collaboration with Glenn Paige; see R. Snyder and Paige, 1958; Paige, 1959; Paige, 1968). Numerous scholars echoed this theme in their work, which ranged from the study of foreign policymaking in very small groups to the study of foreign policymaking in very large organizations and bureaucracies.
Small group dynamics. Some of the most theoretically long-lived work produced during this period centered on the consequences of making foreign policy decisions in small groups. Social psychologists had explored the unique dynamics of such decision setting before, but never in relation to foreign policy decisionmaking, where the stakes might be much higher. The most important work is that of Irving Janis, whose seminal Victims of Groupthink (simply Groupthink in later editions) almost single-handedly began this research tradition. In that volume, and using studies drawn specifically from the realm of foreign policy, Janis shows convincingly that the motivation to maintain group consensus and personal acceptance by the group can cause deterioration of decisionmaking quality. The empirical research of Leana (1975), Semmel (1982), Semmel and Minix (1979), Tetlock (1979), and others was extended using aggregate analysis of experimental data, as well as case studies. Groupthink becomes one outcome of several possible in the work of Charles F. Hermann (1978). Hermann categorizes groups along several dimensions (size, role of leader, rules for decision, autonomy of group participants) and is able to make general predictions about the likely outcome of deliberations in each type of group.
The work of the second wave moved “beyond groupthink,” to both refine and extend our understanding of small group processes. Representative work includes ’t Hart, Stern, and Sundelius (1997); Herek, Janis, and Huth (1987, 1989); McCauley (1989); Ripley (1989); P. Stewart, Hermann, and Hermann (1989); and Gaenslen (1992).
The second wave also brought with it a new research issue: How does a group come to understand, represent, and frame a given foreign policy situation? Works include those by George Breslauer, Charles F. Hermann, Donald Sylvan, Philip Tetlock, and James Voss (Vertzberger, 1990; Breslauer and Tetlock, 1991; Voss, Wolfe, Lawrence, and Engle, 1991; Billings and Hermann, 1994). Turning to efforts by individual scholars, we will highlight the work of Khong (1992) and Boynton (1991).
Boynton wishes to understand how human agents in groups come to agreement on the nature of a foreign policy situation. In his 1991 piece cited above, he uses the official record of congressional committee hearings to investigate how committee members make sense of current events and policies. By viewing the questions and responses in the hearing as an unfolding narrative, Boynton is able to chart how “meaning” crystallizes for each committee member, and how they attempt to share that meaning with other members and with those who are testifying. Boynton posits the concept of “interpretive triple” as a way to understand how connections between facts are made through plausible interpretation—in effect, ascertaining which interpretations are plausible within the social context created by the hearings.
Khong’s 1992 book, Analogies at War, has a similar aim but a different focus: the use of analogies to guide problem framing by foreign policymakers. In this particular work, Khong demonstrates how the use of conflicting analogies to frame the problem of Vietnam led to conceptual difficulties in group reasoning about policy options. The “Korea” analogy gained ascendance in framing the Vietnam problem, without sufficient attention paid to the incongruities between the two sets of circumstances.
Organizational process and bureaucratic politics. This first period also saw the emergence of a strong research agenda that examined the influence of organizational process and bureaucratic politics on foreign policy decisionmaking. The foundations of this approach can be traced back to Weber’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations (from the 1920s). First-period research showed how “rational” foreign policymaking can be upended by the attempt to work with and through large, organized governmental groups. Organizations and bureaucracies put their own survival at the top of their list of priorities, and this survival is measured by relative influence vis-à-vis other organizations (“turf”), by the organization’s budget, and by the morale of its personnel. The organization will zealously guard and seek to increase its turf and strength, as well as to preserve undiluted what it feels to be its “essence” or “mission.” Large organizations also develop standard operating procedures (SOPs), which, while allowing them to react reflexively despite their inherent unwieldiness, permit little flexibility or creativity. These SOPs may be the undoing of more innovative solutions of decisionmakers operating at levels higher than the organization, but there is little alternative to the implementation of policy by bureaucracy. The interface between objectives and implementation is directly met at this point, and there may be substantial slippage between the two, due to the incompatibility of the players’ perspectives.
Although the articulation of this research agenda can be found in works such as Huntington (1960), Hilsman (1967), Neustadt (1970), and Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder (1962), probably the most cited works are Allison (1971) and Halperin (1974; additional works coauthored by Halperin include Allison and Halperin, 1972 and Halperin and Kanter, 1973). In his famous Essence of Decision, Graham Allison offers three cuts at explaining one episode in foreign policy—the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Investigating both the U.S. and the Soviet sides of this case, Allison shows that the unitary rational actor model of foreign policymaking does not suffice to explain the curiosities of the crisis. Offering two additional models as successive “cuts” at explanation, the organizational process model and the bureaucratic politics model (one of intraorganizational factors, one of interorganizational factors), allows Allison to explain more fully what transpired. His use of three levels of analysis also points to the desire to integrate rather than segregate explanations at different levels.
Halperin’s book Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (1974) is an extremely detailed amalgam of generalizations about bureaucratic behavior, accompanied by unforgettable examples from American defense policymaking of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson years. It should be noted that bureaucratic politics research gained impetus from the Vietnam War going on during this period, because the war was seen by the public as defense policy run amok due, in part, to bureaucratic imperatives (see, for example, Krasner, 1971).
Those who took up James Rosenau’s challenge to build a cross-national and multilevel theory of foreign policy and subject that theory to rigorous aggregate empirical testing created the subfield known as Comparative Foreign Policy (CFP). It is in CFP that we see most directly the legacy of scientism/behavioralism in FPA’s genealogy. Foreign policy could not be studied in aggregate; foreign policy behavior could. Searching for an analog to the “vote” as the fundamental explanandum in behavioralist American political studies, CFPers proposed the foreign policy “event”: the tangible artifact of the influence attempt that is foreign policy, alternatively viewed as “who does what to whom, how” in international affairs. Events could be compared along behavioral dimensions, such as whether positive or negative affect was being displayed, or what instruments of statecraft (e.g., diplomatic, military, economics, etc.) were used in the influence attempt, or what level of commitment of resources was evident. Behavior as disparate as a war, a treaty, and a state visit could now be compared and aggregated in a theoretically meaningful fashion.
This conceptualization of the dependent variable was essential to the theory-building enterprise in CFP. To uncover law-like generalizations, one would have to conduct empirical testing across nations and across time; case studies were not an efficient methodology from this standpoint. However, with the conceptual breakthrough of the “event,” it was now possible to collect data on a variety of possible explanatory factors and determine (by analyzing the variance in the events’ behavioral dimensions) the patterns by which these independent variables were correlated with foreign policy behavior (see McGowan and Shapiro, 1973). Indeed, to talk to some scholars involved in CFP research, it seemed that their goal was nothing less than a GUT (grand unified theory) of all foreign policy behavior for all nations for all time. Some set of master equations would link all the relevant variables, independent and dependent, together, and when applied to massive databases providing values for these variables, would yield r-squares approaching 1.0. Though the goal was perhaps naive in its ambition, the sheer enormousness of the task called forth immense efforts in theory building, data collection, and methodological innovation that have few parallels in International Relations.
The collection of “events data” was funded to a significant degree by the U.S. government. Andriole and Hopple (1981) estimate that the government (primarily the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] and the National Science Foundation [NSF]) provided over $5 million for the development of events data sets during the time period 1967–1981. Generally speaking, the collection effort went like this: students (and I was one of those) were employed to comb through newspapers, chronologies, and other sources for foreign policy events, which they would then code according to rules listed in their coding manuals, have their coding periodically checked for intercoder reliability, and finally punch their codings up on computer cards. So, for example, if we wanted to code an event such as “The United States invaded Afghanistan,” we would code a date (DDMMYYYY), the actor (United States), the subject (Afghanistan), and some code or series of codes that would indicate “invasion.” A series of codes might work like this: the code for invasion might be “317,” the “3” indicating this was a hostile act, the “1” indicating it was a military act, the “7” indicating in more specific fashion an invasion. Many other variables could also be coded; for example, we might code that the United Nations facilitated the act by sponsoring a Security Council resolution; we might link in previous events such as Mullah Omar’s refusal to turn in Osama bin Laden, and so forth. Events data sets, then, contain thousands or even millions of lines of code, each of which is a foreign policy “event.”
The acronyms of some of these events data projects live on: some because the data are still being collected (see, for example, Gerner et al., 1994; some collection was funded by the DDIR [Data Development for International Research] Project of the NSF), others because even though data is no longer being added to the set, the data are still useful as a testing ground for hypotheses: WEIS (the World Event/Interaction Survey), COPDAB (the Conflict and Peace Data Bank), CREON (Comparative Research on the Events of Nations), and so forth. KEDS (Kansas Event Data System; now renamed PSED for Penn State Event Data Project) is more of a second-wave effort, in that Philip Schrodt and his team developed machine coding of events, leading to much more reliable and capacious data collection and coding than was possible in the first wave of events data (Schrodt, 1995). The Behavioral Correlates of War (BCOW) data set also came into being during the second generation of effort (Leng, 1995 [written in 1993]), and Gary King’s machine-coded dyadic events data set’s start date is 1990 (King and Lowe, 2003).
In contrast to the other two types of FPA scholarship being discussed, CFP research aimed explicitly at integrated multilevel explanations. The four most ambitious of these projects were those of Michael Brecher (1972) and his associates of the Interstate Behavior Analysis (IBA) Project (Wilkenfeld et al., 1980), of the Dimensions of Nations (DON) Project (Rummel, 1972, 1977), of the Comparative Research on the Events of Nations (CREON) Project (East, Salmore, and Hermann, 1978; Callahan, Brady, and Hermann, 1982), and of Harold Guetzkow’s Internation Simulation (INS) Project (Guetzkow, 1963). Independent variables at several levels of analysis were linked by theoretical propositions (sometimes instantiated in statistical or mathematical equations) to properties or types of foreign policy behavior. At least three of the four attempted to confirm or disconfirm the propositions by aggregate empirical testing. Unfortunately, the fact that the empirical results were not all that had been hoped for ushered in a period of disenchantment with all things CFP, as we will see in a later section.
The mind of a foreign policymaker is not a tabula rasa: it contains complex and intricately related information and patterns, such as beliefs, attitudes, values, experiences, emotions, traits, style, memory, and national and self-conceptions. Each decisionmaker’s mind is a microcosm of the variety possible in a given society. Culture, history, geography, economics, political institutions, ideology, demographics, and innumerable other factors shape the societal context in which the decisionmaker operates. The Sprouts (1956, 1957, 1965) referred to these as the milieu of decisionmaking, and scholarly efforts to explore that milieu were both innovative and impressive during this first period. Michael Brecher’s work cited above (1972) belongs in this genotype as well. Brecher’s The Foreign Policy System of Israel explores that nation’s psychocultural environment and its effects on Israel’s foreign policy. Unlike Brecher’s integrative approach to the psychosocial milieu, most works in this genotype examined either the psychological aspects of FPDM or the broader societal aspects of it.
Would there be a distinct field of Foreign Policy Analysis without this most micro of all explanatory levels? Arguably not. It is in the cognition and information processing of an actual human agent that all the explanatory levels of FPA are in reality integrated. What sets FPA apart from more mainstream IR is this insistence that, as M. Hermann and Kegley put it, “A compelling explanation [of foreign policy] cannot treat the decider exogenously” (1994, 4).
Political psychology can assist us in understanding the decider. Under certain conditions—high stress, high uncertainty, dominant position of the head of state in FPDM—the personal characteristics of the individual would become crucial in understanding foreign policy choice. The work of Harold Lasswell on political leadership was a significant influence on many early pioneers of political psychology with reference to foreign policy (see Lasswell, 1930, 1948). Joseph de Rivera’s The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy (1968) is an excellent survey and integration of early attempts to apply psychological and social psychological theory to foreign policy cases. Another early effort at a systematic study of leader personality effects is the concept of “operational code,” an idea originating with Leites (1951) and refined and extended by one of the most important figures in this area of research: Alexander George (1969). Defining an operational code involves identifying the core political beliefs of the leader about the inevitability of conflict in the world, the leader’s estimation of his or her own power to change events, and so forth, as well as an exploration of the preferred means and style of pursuing goals (see also Johnson, 1977; O. Holsti, 1977; Walker, 1977). It should be noted that George’s influence on the field is by no means confined to his work on operational codes; he offered useful suggestions on methodological issues (see George, 1979, on process tracing), on the demerits of abstract theorizing versus actor-specific theory (see George and Smoke, 1974, and George, 1993), and on the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice in foreign policy (see George, 1993, 1994).
The work of Margaret G. Hermann is likewise an attempt to typologize leaders with specific reference to foreign policy dispositions. A psychologist by training, she was also involved in a CFP project (CREON). However, the core of her research is leaders’ personal characteristics (1970, 1978). Using a modified operational code framework in conjunction with content analysis, she is able to compare and contrast leaders’ beliefs, motivations, decisional styles, and interpersonal styles. Furthermore, Hermann integrates this information into a more holistic picture of the leader, who may belong to one of six distinct “foreign policy orientations.” Orientation allows her to make more specific projections about a leader’s behavior in a variety of circumstances. In the second wave of research, scholars began to explicitly compare and contrast the findings of different personality assessment schemes (Winter, Hermann, Weintraub, and Walker, 1991; Singer and Hudson, 1992; Snare, 1992).
The role of perceptions and images in foreign policy was a very important research agenda in this first generation of FPA. The work of both Robert Jervis and Richard Cottam deserves special mention here. Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976) and Cottam’s Foreign Policy Motivation: A General Theory and a Case Study (1977) both explicate the potentially grave consequences of misperception in foreign policy situations by exploring its roots. Deterrence strategies can fail catastrophically if misperception of the other’s intentions or motivations occurs (see also O. Holsti, North, and Brody’s stimulus-response models, 1968). Like that of Janis, Halperin, and others, the work of Jervis and Cottam is consciously prescriptive: both include advice and suggestions for policymakers. Work in the late 1980s continuing this tradition included scholarship by Janice Gross Stein, Richard Ned Lebow, Ole Holsti, Alexander George, Deborah Welch Larson, Betty Glad, Martha Cottam, and Stephen Walt (Jervis, Lebow, and Stein, 1985, 1990; M. Cottam, 1986; George and Smoke, 1989; O. Holsti, 1989; Larson, 1985, 1993; Glad, 1989; Walt, 1992). An excellent example of work in this period is that of Richard Herrmann (1985, 1986, 1993), who developed a typology of stereotypical images with reference to Soviet perceptions (the other as “child,” as “degenerate,” etc.) and began to extend his analysis to the images held by other nations, including American and Islamic images.
The work on cognitive constraints was informed by the work of scholars in other fields, including that of Herbert Simon (1985) on bounded rationality, Richards Heuer (1999, but written 1978–1986) on cognitive bias; and Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982) on heuristic error. Many other important cognitive and psychological studies that came forth during the 1970s and early 1980s dealt with a diversity of factors: motivations of leaders (Winter, 1973; Etheredge, 1978; Barber, 1985); cognitive maps, scripts, and schemas (Shapiro and Bonham, 1973; Axelrod, 1976; Carbonell, 1978); cognitive style (Suedfeld and Tetlock, 1977); life experience of leaders (L. Stewart, 1977); and others. Good edited collections of the time include M. Hermann with Milburn (1977) and Falkowski (1979).
Kal Holsti’s elucidation of “national role conception” spans both the psychological and the social milieus (1970). With this concept, Holsti seeks to capture how a nation views itself and its role in the international arena. Operationally, Holsti turns to elite perceptions of national role, arguing that these perceptions are arguably more salient to foreign policy choice. Perception of national role is also influenced by societal character, a product of the nation’s socialization process. Differences here can lead to differences in national behavior as well (see, for example, Bobrow, Chan, and Kringen, 1979; Broderson, 1961; Hess, 1963; Merelman, 1969; Renshon, 1977). The methodology of national role conception was sustained in the 1980s by Walker (1987b) and others (Wish, 1980; M. Cottam and Shih, 1992; Shih, 1993).
The study of culture as an independent variable affecting foreign policy was just beginning to be redeveloped near the end of the 1980s, after petering out in the 1960s (Almond and Verba, 1963; Pye and Verba, 1965). Culture might have an effect on cognition (Motokawa, 1989); it might have ramifications for structuration of institutions such as bureaucracies (Sampson, 1987). Conflict resolution techniques might be different for different cultures as well (Cushman and King, 1985; Pye, 1986; Gaenslen, 1989). Indeed, the very processes of policymaking might be stamped by one’s cultural heritage and socialization (Holland, 1984; Etheredge, 1985; Lampton, 1986; Merelman, 1986; Leung, 1987; Banerjee, 1991a, 1991b; Voss and Dorsey, 1992).
The study of the role of societal groups in foreign policymaking can be seen as an outgrowth of the more advanced study of societal groups in American domestic politics. Sometimes an individual scholar used theory developed for the American case to explore the more diverse universe of the international system: for example, it was Robert Dahl’s volume Regimes and Oppositions (1973) that provided key theoretical concepts necessary to analyze the relationship between domestic political pressure by societal groups and foreign policy choice by the government. Other more country- and region-specific case studies were also developed: see Chittick (1970), Dallin (1969), Deutsch et al. (1967), Hellman (1969), Hughes (1978), and Ogata (1977), among others. In the late 1980s, a new wave of thinking began to explore the limits of state autonomy in relation to other societal groups in the course of policymaking. The work of Putnam (1988) on the “two-level game” of foreign and domestic policy was paradigmatic for establishing the major questions of this research subfield. Other excellent work includes Evans, Rueschmeyer, and Skocpol (1985); Lamborn and Mumme (1989); Levy (1988); Levy and Vakili (1992); Hagan (1987); and Mastanduno, Lake, and Ikenberry (1989). A second wave of research in this area can be seen in the work of Van Belle (1993), Skidmore and Hudson (1993), and Kaarbo (1993) (see also Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1992, for an interesting combination of game theory and FPA to understand domestic political imperatives and their effect on foreign policy).
The second-wave work of Joe Hagan deserves special note. Hagan (1993) compiled an extensive database on the fragmentation and vulnerability of political regimes, with special reference to executive/legislative structures. The set covered ninety-four regimes for thirty-eight nations over a ten-year period. His purpose was to explore the effects of political opposition on foreign policy choice. Using aggregate statistical analysis, Hagan was able to show, for example, that the internal fragmentation of a regime has substantially less effect on foreign policy behavior than military or party opposition to the regime.
Domestic political imperatives could also be ascertained by probing elite and mass opinion (again, piggybacking onto the sophisticated voter-attitude studies of American politics). Though usually confined to studies of democratic nations (especially America, where survey research results were abundant), these analyses were used to investigate the limits of the so-called Almond-Lippmann consensus: that is, that public opinion is incoherent and lacking unity on foreign policy issues, and thus that public opinion does not have a large impact on the nation’s conduct of foreign policy (see Bailey, 1948; Almond, 1950; Lippmann, 1955; Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes, 1964; Converse, 1964; Lipset, 1966). Opinion data collected during the Vietnam War period appears to have served as a catalyst to reexamine this question. Caspary (1970) and Achen (1975) found more stability in American public opinion concerning foreign policy and international involvement than their predecessors. Mueller (1973) used the Vietnam War to show that although the public may change their opinions on international issues, they do so for rational reasons. O. Holsti and Rosenau (1979) and Mandelbaum and Schneider (1979) use survey data to identify recognizable ideological positions to which the public subscribes on foreign policy issues. A large amount of research was undertaken to show that public and elite opinion does affect governmental foreign policy decisionmaking (see Cantril, 1967; Graber, 1968; Hughes, 1978; Yankelovich, 1979; Wittkopf with Maggiotto, 1981; Beal and Hinckley, 1984; Verba and Brody, 1970; Verba et al., 1967).
The study of the effect of national attributes (size, wealth, political accountability, economic system, etc.) on foreign policy was certainly, in a theoretical sense, in the Sprout genotype, but was carried out by scholars and with methods more appropriately placed in the Rosenau genotype (if you exclude Lenin and others who had never heard of Rosenau!). The propensity to be involved in war was usually the foreign policy dependent variable of choice in this work (see Rummel, 1972, 1977, 1979; East, 1978; Kean and McGowan, 1973; East and Hermann, 1974; Salmore and Salmore, 1978). Are large nations more likely to go to war than small nations? Are rich nations more likely to go to war than poor ones? Statistical manipulation of aggregate data, at best a blunt instrument, was unable to uncover any law-like generalizations on this score (though for an interesting and hard-to-classify treatment of the multilevel causes and effects of war, see Beer, 1981). Political economy research on the effects of economic structures and conditions on foreign policy choice is fairly rare: the “culture” of international political economy (IPE) and the “culture” of FPA did not mix well for reasons explored below. However, the works of Neil Richardson and Charles Kegley (see, for example, Richardson and Kegley, 1980) and of Peter Katzenstein (see, for example, P. Katzenstein, 1985) are notable as exceptions to this generalization.
However, in the second-wave years, one notable exception to the above analysis burst forth upon the scene: democratic peace theory. Democracies, it was noted, tend not to fight one another, though they fight nondemocratic countries as often as other nondemocracies do. This appeared to be an example of how a difference in polity type led to a difference in foreign policy behavior (Russett, 1993a, 1993b). This has been an interesting bridging question for FPA and IR. Why do democracies not fight one another? Here we find more abstract theorists of war (Merritt and Zinnes, 1991; Morgan, 1992; Bremer, 1993; Dixon, 1993; Maoz and Russett, 1993; Ray, 1993) wrestling with a question that leads them into FPA waters and into conversation with FPA scholars (Hagan, 1994; M. Hermann and Kegley, 1995).
Finally, if it is possible to see the international system as part of the psychosocial milieu in which foreign policy decisionmaking takes place, then the work of much of mainstream IR at this time can be seen as contributing to the FPA research agenda. The effects of system type, as elucidated by Morton Kaplan (1957, 1972), may depend on the number of poles in the system, the distribution of power among poles, and the rules of the system game that permit its maintenance. This structure may then determine to a large extent the range of permissible foreign policy behavior of nations. The work of Waltz was extremely influential in its description of the effects of an anarchical world system on the behavior of its member states (see also Hoffman, 1961; Rosecrance, 1963; J. Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey, 1972). FPA seemed not to emphasize this type of explanation, primarily because the variation in behavior during the time when a certain system is maintained cannot be explained by reference to system structure because the structure has not changed. Explanation of that variation must be found at lower levels of analysis, where variation in the explanans can be identified. Here, then, is one of several sources for the notable lack of integration between actor-general systems theory in IR and FPA.
A period of critical self-reflection began in the late 1970s and continued until the mid-1980s in FPA. The effects were felt unevenly across FPA; CFP was affected the most: it is here we see the most pruning, both theoretical and methodological, which will be discussed in a moment. In decisionmaking studies, there was a period of rather slow growth due to methodological considerations. The information requirements to conduct a high-quality group or bureaucratic analysis of a foreign policy choice are tremendous. If one were not part of the group or bureaucracy in question, detailed accounts of what transpired, preferably from a variety of primary source viewpoints, would be necessary. Because of security considerations in foreign policy, such information is usually not available for many years (e.g., until declassified). The question facing decisionmaking scholars became: Is it possible to be theoretically and policy relevant if one is relegated to doing case studies of events twenty or more years old? If so, how? If not, how is it possible to maneuver around the high data requirements to say something meaningful about more recent events? (see Anderson, 1987). Scholars wrestling with this issue came up with two basic responses: (a) patterns in group/bureaucratic processes can be isolated through historical case studies, on the basis of which both general predictions of and general recommendations for present-day foreign policy decisionmaking can be made; and (b) innovative at-a-distance indicators of closed group/bureaucracy process can be developed, allowing for more specific explanation/prediction of resultant foreign policy choice.
FPA work at the psychological level actually expanded during this time period, but work at the societal level arguably contracted on some research fronts. Perhaps one reason for this bifurcation in the genotype was a methodological one: psychology provided ready-made and effective tools for the study of political psychology; political science did not offer the foreign policy analyst the same advantage. To understand how the broader sociocultural-political context within a nation-state contributes to its governmental policymaking (whether domestic or foreign) is, perforce, the domain of the Comparative Politics subfield of Political Science. It is hopefully not controversial to aver that the theories and methods of Comparative Politics in this earlier period of time were not quite as highly developed as those of psychology. The attempt to graft “scientific” statistical analyses of variance onto the underdeveloped theory of Comparative Politics of the 1970s and 1980s was a failure. More successful were efforts to spin existing Comparative Politics work on a particular nation to the cause of explaining factors that contribute to that nation’s foreign policy—for example, borrowing techniques from American politics (such as public opinion surveys) to study domestic political imperatives in a variety of countries on foreign policy issues. Still missing in this earlier time period were the conceptual and methodological tools necessary to push past the silo wall between Comparative Politics and International Relations that stymied theory development. One of the greatest leaps forward in the present period of FPA was the innovative work by Robert Putnam on conceptualizing the “two-level game,” which would lead to advancement in this theoretical area in subsequent years (Putnam, 1988).
As mentioned, CFP dwindled in the 1980s. Indeed, the very term comparative foreign policy began to sound quaint and naive. Membership in the Comparative Foreign Policy section of the International Studies Association plummeted. Public vivisections took place, while Rosenau genotype–style scholarship became scarce. Both sympathetic and unsympathetic criticism abounded (see, e.g., Ashley, 1976, 1987; Munton, 1976; East, 1978; Kegley, 1980; Caporaso, Hermann, and Kegley, 1987; C. Hermann and Peacock, 1987; Smith, 1987). At one point, in exasperation, Kegley (1980, 12; himself a CFPer) chides, “CFP risks being labelled a cult of methodological flagello-maniacs.”
This searing criticism and self-criticism revealed a number of inconsistencies in the CFP approach, which needed to be sorted out before any progress could be contemplated. The stumbling blocks included the following:
Hindsight is always 20/20: it does seem clear in retrospect that change was necessary. Left behind were the aim of a grand unified theory and the methodological straitjacket imposed by the requirement of aggregate empirical testing. In 1980, Kegley spoke of the need to come down from the rarefied air of grand theory to middle-range theory, and to capture more of the particular:
To succeed partially is not to fail completely… . Goals [should be] downgraded to better fit capacities… . This prescribes reduction in the level of generality sought, so that more contextually-qualified, circumstantially bounded, and temporally/spatially-specified propositions are tested. More of the peculiar, unique, and particular can be captured at a reduced level of abstraction and generality. (12, 19)
To be fair, this was arguably Rosenau’s original aim, and the CFP community had to reach a consensus to return to its founding vision. The conference on New Directions in the Study of Foreign Policy, held at Ohio State University in May 1985, probably represents a finalization of these changes for the CFP group (see the resulting volume, M. Hermann, C. Hermann, and Hagan, 1987; see also Gerner, 1992).
As FPA was being liberated from its inconsistencies in the late 1980s, the world was being liberated from the chess match of the Cold War. This was a felicitous coincidence for FPA and was an added source of vigor for its research agenda. The significance of this temporal coincidence can be understood by remembering what types of IR theory were in ascendance at the time: neorealist systems structure theory and rational choice modeling. Indeed, the dominance was so overwhelming that to take an IR theory course during this time, one would think these two were the summum bonum of all thinking in International Relations (at least in the United States). This state of affairs was natural for American thinkers: America was one of two poles of power in the Cold War international system. A bipolar quasi-zero-sum rivalry lends itself relatively well to abstract, actor-general analysis focused primarily on the macroconstraints imposed by the system. Furthermore, actor-general theory was more practical for scholars during the Cold War, because so little was known of the black box of the closed Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern bloc foreign policy decisionmaking bodies.
However, when the bipolar system collapsed with the fall of the Soviet bloc regimes, an important theoretical discovery was made: it is impossible to explain or predict system change on the basis of system-level variables alone. Along the same lines, in a period of great uncertainty and flux, lack of empirically grounded inputs to rational choice equations is deadly in terms of the usefulness of such analysis. Our intuitive understanding of the collapse involves variables more to be found in FPA: the personalities of Gorbachev, Havel, Walesa; the activities of transnational groups such as the Lutheran Church and the Green Movement; the struggles between various domestic political players, such as the military, the Communist Party, the bureaucrats; the role of economics and societal needs in sparking the desire for change. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the need for an “actor-specific” complement to mainstream IR theory became stark in its clarity.
FPA in the post–Cold War era retains the distinctive theoretical commitments that demarcated at its inception. Included among these are the following:
A striking trend in the direction of post–Cold War IR is the degree to which it has moved toward surveying the intellectual terrain historically explored by the FPA subfield. FPA’s third generation has labored during a period when there has been a growing interest in the questions and topics that have always been central to the FPA enterprise. For example, Juliet Kaarbo (2015, 198) recently observed how, “compared to 20 years ago, domestic political and decision-making concepts are very much part of contemporary IR theory.” Increasingly, the leading research agendas and themes emerging in IR are buying into some the theoretical commitments of FPA outlined above.
Most prominent of these post–Cold War developments, briefly mentioned earlier, has been the “constructivist turn” in IR, which took root in the early 1990s and saw scholars expand the theoretical horizons of IR theory by unpacking the black box of the state to show how state interests and identity are mutually constituted (Checkel, 1998). Our earlier discussion about Alexander Wendt’s work highlighted how, among other shared affinities, constructivists and FPA scholars both critique structuralist IR theories and pay attention to domestic politics. Indeed, the strong commonalities Houghton (2007) observed between constructivist and FPA approaches to international politics led him to advocate for FPAers to prioritize engaging with constructivist scholars studying foreign policy to reinvigorate the FPA subfield and establish a larger theoretical footprint within the discipline. Houghton is not alone, with numerous scholars seeing constructivism and FPA as naturally linked (for more on how, see Kaarbo, 2015, 199–203). Yet while there is scope for theoretical progress to be made at the intersection of FPA and constructivism (something we address further in chapter 8), little substantive engagement has occurred to this point.
A decade after the “constructivist turn” took hold, IR scholars borrowed from sociology once more to initiate the “practice turn” (Neumann, 2002; Adler and Pouliot, 2011). Scholars advancing this research agenda sought to understand how “practices”—the “patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts” (Adler and Pouliot, 2011, 5)—influenced world politics. The substantial synergies between practice theory and the insights of FPA have been recognized (e.g., Pouliot and Cornut, 2015) but, once again, the engagement has been minimal (albeit promising) to this point, with the result that the role of human agency remains underdeveloped. FPA scholars, of course, would contend that it is individual actors who ultimately perform “patterned actions,” necessitating use of FPA methodologies.
These examples help to illustrate an uncomfortable duality that is discernible in the post–Cold War relationship between IR and the FPA subfield. On the one hand, there appears to be general and growing receptiveness within the field to the perspectives and insights FPA is positioned to offer. On the other hand, these developments also reveal a troubling reality: as IR scholars increasingly engage with FPA-type questions, they typically do so without “grafting in” classic or contemporary FPA theory. For example, in her review of Why Leaders Fight (Horowitz, Ellis, and Stam, 2015), a recent study that uses a new data set to examine the attributes of leaders that lead to conflict, Breuning (2016) praised the “valuable contribution” made by the authors, but nonetheless took the opportunity to highlight how “deeper engagement with the contributions of foreign policy analysis” would improve the “theoretical grounding” of conflict scholars. Breuning’s critique will be dishearteningly familiar to FPA scholars, not least because it can just as readily be applied to many other contemporary contributions within the field.
Consider a recent Duck of Minerva blogpost by Parajon et al. (2019a), in which the authors suggest, “Among IR scholars, research on the role of individuals in world politics, or the ‘first image,’ has languished for three decades. With the dominance of structural and rationalist approaches in the late 20th century, combined with skepticism individuals can be studied in a systematic, rather than idiosyncratic way, the first image has largely been neglected.” They then note that a survey of IR scholars felt the United States was less respected in the world than previously, and that this was due to the presidency of Donald Trump. They then rightly point out, “The way [IR] scholars talk about foreign policy during the Trump administration does not mirror the way they study it … Trump is a challenge to the discipline, reminding us that our scholarship is out of sync with how we think the world works.” Parajon et al. conclude by calling for a First Image “renaissance” in IR. The authors of the volume you hold in your hands were not sure whether to be happy (at the realization by IR scholars that greater theoretical emphasis on agency is critical), or cry (at the realization that these IR scholars seem ignorant that “First Image” scholarship is alive and well in the IR subfield of FPA).
Why are the theoretical foundations established by three generations of FPA scholars so rarely leveraged by non-FPA scholars? The most straightforward answer is that non-FPA scholars are not simply aware of them. As Kaarbo (2015, 190) concedes, “FPA is not typically acknowledged as part of ‘IR theory’ ” (see also Houghton, 2007, 26). If you have undertaken any IR theory courses, you are likely already conscious of this. FPA is rarely afforded a standalone section in a syllabus (even allowing for the fact that a few classic FPA texts are usually included). Nor does FPA typically receive a dedicated chapter in IR theory textbooks. Instead, when you think of IR theory, your mind probably gravitates towards the “isms”; primarily realism, liberalism and constructivism, but perhaps also Marxism and feminism. While FPA overlaps with each of these “isms” to varying degrees and in various ways, it nonetheless remains distinct from each of them. Until doctoral students in IR are routinely exposed to FPA in their graduate school curriculum, this strange and unprofitable disconnect will be perpetuated to the detriment of the entire field of IR. Indeed, this state of affairs was the major impetus for this very volume.
You may remember how we promised at the outset of this chapter that this book would lead you into a realm of IR theory to which you may have never been exposed. FPA diverges from other subfields of IR in its dedication to the “seeing” of human agency, human accountability, and human accountability. FPA offers a distinct perspective on international relations (see Kaarbo, 2015) that places human decisionmakers at the center of the theoretical matrix (Hudson, 2005, 3–4). This alternative viewpoint is the engine room of FPA’s theoretical comparative advantage, which, as we have discussed, could be of great benefit to International Relations. Yet, as Parajon et al. (2019a) demonstrate, this viewpoint remains a marginal one in the discipline; they calculate that only 12.5 percent of articles published in leading IR journals have “featured any engagement with the first image,” a level well below the level of engagement with Second or Third image perspectives.
Overturning the conspicuous absence of FPA as a recognized site of theory construction and agent-oriented methodologies within IR is the central task of future generations of FPA scholars. As the post–Cold War trajectory of IR bends toward the “core business” of FPA, the next generation must work to shatter the stubborn endurance of the historical “disconnect between FPA and theory” (Kaarbo, 2015, 189). To be sure, FPA scholars share the blame for this disconnect. Yet in order to engage confidently and constructively with the broader field, the next generation of FPA scholars must be aware of their theoretical heritage. They must understand how knowledge in the subfield has cumulated over preceding generations and how contemporary theorizing has built on and extended the classic contributions of earlier generations of scholars (Neack, Hey, and Haney, 1995). Only then will they be positioned to further our understanding of how human decisionmakers shape global politics. Equipping you to contribute to the next generation of FPA is the chief objective of this book.
In a moment, we will conclude this chapter by outlining how this book is structured to promote this objective, but before doing so, we want to underscore why the present time is an especially propitious time to be studying FPA. We will revisit these themes in more detail in the concluding chapter, where we discuss the future of FPA. At this point, however, we want to alert you to three reasons why studying FPA theory is becoming increasingly relevant in the contemporary environment.
Oddly enough, the first reason is the 2016 election of President Donald Trump in the United States. Trump’s election was both unexpected and challenged the explanatory capability of existing international relations theories, paralleling the challenge posed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latter event catalyzed a fresh round of foreign policy theory development (C. F. Hermann, 1995, 250), as Trump’s Presidency is poised to do (see Parajon, Jordan, and Holmes, 2019a, 2019b). As Michael Barnett (2018) has contended, international relations theory “has not been up to the challenge regarding the Age of Trump.” The increasingly fraught trans-Atlantic relationship, the positions taken on immigration and the utility of tariffs, and the seeming admiration for other “strong man” leaders such as Vladimir Putin seem a significant discontinuity in American foreign policy. Academics, allies, enemies, policymakers, and the general public are urgently seeking insight into Trump’s foreign policy, and we argue such insight cannot be forthcoming without addressing Trump, the man. Then, as now, the need for IR scholars to do a better job of incorporating individual level factors into their explanations of world politics appears self-evident—or at least to those who are not IR scholars.
The era of Trump demands we revisit the agent-structure problematique afresh. We see this, for example, in the way commentators are divided on the degree to which Trump will be (and has been) able to overcome domestic and international constraints or will be (or has been) constrained by them. As Robert Jervis (2018, 3) has recently observed, “Whatever else is true of Donald Trump’s presidency, it offers a great opportunity to test theories of international relations.” Trump’s iconoclasm has dramatically raised the demand for informed explanations of how and when leaders matter for global politics, both within and without the academy. In this environment, FPA scholars are uniquely placed to respond by demonstrating the insights that can be obtained with an actor-specific perspective. Elizabeth Saunders and James Goldgeier have been exemplars in this respect. Their various contributions aimed at informed general readers discussing what to expect from Trump’s foreign policy—both as coauthors (Goldgeier and Saunders, 2017, 2018) and individually (Saunders, 2016, 2018; Goldgeier, 2018)—are clearly informed by their knowledge of the FPA literature and their own scholarship on the role leaders play in shaping foreign policy decisionmaking (e.g., Goldgeier, 1994; Saunders, 2011). As a fourth generation of FPA scholarship begins to emerge, it appears likely that it will be decisively shaped by theoretical engagement with ideas and questions spawned in response to the phenomenon of Trump’s presidency. If so, future scholars will likely see FPA’s third generation as beginning with Gorbachev and ending with Trump—a generational span that also coincides neatly with the period of unipolarity.
This brings us to a second reason for the contemporary relevance of FPA theory—the prevailing uncertainty in the international order. While scholars are divided on the future of the liberal international order that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, there is broad agreement that the global order is at an inflection point. At periods of transition we expect the role of leaders to be more pronounced, meaning FPA is uniquely poised to help at this particular moment in world history. How do we transition from U.S. primacy to a period of multipolarity and what role will leaders play in this shift? To what extent are individual leaders capable of shaping the emergent order? These questions, and others like them, are increasingly monopolizing the attention of the media, governments, and scholars.
It is instructive to observe how leading scholars have recently been drawn to examine how political leaders navigated periods of global upheaval. For example, Bruce Jentleson’s (2018), The Peacemakers examines the role political leaders have played at crucial turning points in the twentieth century in order to draw lessons for statesmanship in the twenty-first-century. Joseph Nye’s (2013) Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era has a similar forward-looking objective. Nye probes the role various U.S. presidents played in creating and sustaining American primacy, finding not only that “presidents matter,” but that that the leadership skills of transactional presidents tend to be overlooked relative to transformative presidents often overlooked. Or Rosenboim (2017) adopts a different approach, offering an “intellectual history of the complex and nonlinear genealogy of globalism” by focusing on how competing ideas about how to order the post–World War II world were advanced by various public intellectuals in Britain and the United States. These studies, and others like them, reveal how at times of uncertainty and flux, we tend to look at history to find answers to our contemporary challenges, intrinsically aware that at pivotal moments leadership is highly consequential for shaping the future.
A third reason to be confident about the contemporary relevance of FPA theory relates to the current health of the subfield. The third generation has done much to resurrect the subfield within IR. The subfield now has a dedicated journal, Foreign Policy Analysis, which is the second largest section within IR’s professional organization, the International Studies Association (ISA). When the first edition of this book was published, in 2007, there were no other FPA textbooks in print (although Neack, Hey, and Haney, 1995, an edited volume, was often used for this purpose). Breuning’s Foreign Policy Analysis: A Comparative Introduction was also published in 2007, after which a proliferation of dedicated textbooks has been progressively added over the intervening years, which list we will enumerate in chapter 8. Furthermore, while the FPA subfield remains North American centric, the third generation has seen impressive development of non–North American voices, perspectives, and contributions (Brummer and Hudson, 2015). Indeed, the hub of new FPA theorizing may actually now be outside of North America, such as Europe and Australia. That said, much remains to be done to truly move the subfield “beyond the confines of its North American origins” (Hudson, 2015, 10). The shift in the global order has the potential to help accelerate this process, as interest grows in the decisionmaking processes that shape the foreign policy choices of emerging powers. This helps make the current period a promising time to draw in new voices and expand the remit of FPA. We will expand on all these topics in part III of this volume.
The three reasons outlined above make it a wonderful time to become engaged in FPA, a time of new horizons, pressing questions, and opportunity. As Carlnaes puts it, “There remains much to be done to consolidate further a field of study which, despite some lean years in the shadow of the vibrant theoretical developments and debates within the larger discipline of IR, is now ready once again to make more space for itself” (2012, 127). We will now turn to outlining how the rest of the book focuses on providing you with the knowledge base to occupy some of this space and contribute to pushing the boundaries of the subfield.
Why did President Trump agree to meet with Kim Jong-un in Singapore to discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons program? Why are the negotiations for the UK to pull out of the EU (Brexit) so fraught? In what ways, and in what circumstances, are leaders most capable of shaping the emergent global order? These contemporary “big questions” (and others like them) defy simple, one-dimensional responses. To reflect on these questions, even for a moment, brings to mind a myriad of potential explanans that could conceivably have influenced the decisionmaking process in some way. The limitless scope of enquiry around these sorts of questions requires us to adopt an organizing principle of some sort, to facilitate breaking down the “big picture” in smaller, more digestible analytical components. In many contemporary IR curricula, Waltz’s three-fold level of analysis framework remains the most common (Waltz, 1959). However, rather than organizing our examination of explanans that influence foreign policy decisionmakers and their decisions according to whether they originate at the individual, domestic, or international level of analysis, we prefer to delineate nine levels of analysis. Each level of analysis we have identified can helpfully be conceived of as categories of explanans (that is, groups of factors) that influence foreign policy decisionmaking and those who make them.
We explore these nine levels of analysis across the five chapters comprising part II of the book (see table 1.1). We begin within the mind of the individual decisionmaker before progressively funneling outward as we take stock of the classic and contemporary theory in FPA that has helped shape the field thus far. As we step through each chapter and move away from the human decisionmaker (chapter 2) to examine group decisionmaking (chapter 3), issues of culture and identity (chapter 4), and domestic political contestation (chapter 5), the explanans we consider operate at increasingly higher levels of abstraction until (in chapter 6), we consider how national attributes and the international system affect foreign policy. In essence, what we do in part II is to systematically put various explanans “under the microscope,” putting aside the temptation to sift through all of the various influences at work in a given circumstance to see the bigger picture. Many FPA scholars replicate this approach in their work. For example, some scholars tend to focus on examining how group decision dynamics impact foreign policy decisions, and in doing so, pay relatively little attention to other explanans.
Ultimately, however, the purpose of systematically breaking down these explanans and examining them in relative isolation is to improve our understanding of how these “component parts” fit back together as part of integrated explanation of a foreign policy decision or episode. In this sense, the entirety of part II prepares for and points toward part III, which discusses theoretical integration. We specified earlier that one of the hallmarks of FPA is that it views the explanation of foreign policy decisionmaking as multifactorial, with the desideratum of examining variables from more than one level of analysis. Put another way, this simply means that the story of any foreign policy choice will always weave together a multiplicity of factors originating from a variety of levels of analysis. As chapter 7 relates, determining how best to tell this story remains one of the central challenges in FPA.
To understand our approach to structuring the book, it might help to reflect on the way medical doctors are trained. While all medical doctors are ultimately interested in the overall health of their patients, the complexity of the human body requires that they understand how each “component part” of the body functions in isolation. This knowledge then facilitates understanding of how the complex interaction of these various components—the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, the respiratory system, and others—provides an integrated explanation of a given health condition. Furthermore, just as some FPA scholars choose to focus on a given category of explanans, so too do medical specialists focus on one aspect of the body. But this specialization does not mean these expert doctors do not retain the restoration of their patient’s overall health as their ultimate objective. Likewise, theoretical integration—the comprehensive understanding of the factors that combine to lead to a given outcome—remains the ultimate objective of FPA scholars, even if that objective often seems out of reach.
As we work our way through the nine levels of analysis in part II, heading toward the ideal of theoretical integration, we present the theoretical heritage of the discipline as a means to equip you to contribute to its development. Of course, it is simply not possible to cover all pertinent theory in the subsequent chapters. There is simply too much to cover. We will have to make do with a selection of earlier and later theorizing, and we apologize for the fact that we, as very fallible mortals, had to make painful decisions about which theories to discuss, and which not to discuss. Nevertheless, for each level of analysis, we will cover selected important work from earlier periods (1954–1993), but we will also discuss selected important advances made around the turn of the twenty-first century (1994–2018), which were not enumerated in this introductory chapter on the history of FPA (see Hudson (2005) for a brief overview of work up to 2004). For this third edition, we have also made a special effort to highlight recent examples of relevant work by non-U.S. scholars as well as cases that involve non-U.S. decisions. Taken together, we believe this will provide you with a solid, if not perfectly comprehensive, foundation upon which to build in your own research.