Rethinking Foreign Policy Analysis

States, Leaders, and the Microfoundations of Behavioral International Relations

Stephen G. Walker, Akan Malici, Mark Schafer, Stephen G. Walker, Akan Malici, Mark Schafer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415886987
• eBook ISBN: 9781136852442
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stephen G. Walker, Akan Malici, and Mark Schafer present a definitive, social-psychological approach to integrating theories of foreign policy analysis and international relations—addressing the agent-centered, micro-political study of decisions by leaders and the structure-oriented, macro-political study of state interactions as a complex adaptive system. The links between the internal world of beliefs and the external world of events provide the strategic setting in which states collide and leaders decide.

The first part of this ground-breaking book establishes the theoretical framework of neobehavioral IR, setting the stage for the remainder of the work to apply the framework to pressing issues in world politics. Through these applications students can see how a game-theoretic logic can combine with the operational code research program to innovatively combine levels of analysis. The authors employ binary role theory to demonstrate that relying only on a state-systemic level or an individual-decision making level of analysis leads to an incomplete picture of how leaders steer their ships of state through the hazards of international crises to establish stable relations of cooperation or conflict.

PART I
Foreign Policy Analysis

1
FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS AND BEHAVIORAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Stephen G. Walker

Introduction

In the twenty-first century it is hard for political leaders to steer the ship of state without both an internal compass to define the state’s destination and a map to mark the locations of others and relevant geopolitical features of the environment (Walker and Malici forthcoming). Foreign policy mistakes and fiascos can occur when states collide as leaders decide how to navigate the treacherous waters of world politics (Tuchman 1984; Neustadt and May 1986). This problem becomes acute during international crises—turning points in world politics—when at least two states collide and perhaps threaten their mutual existence. In a world of nuclear weapons, a collision may also threaten their neighbors and even the entire planet.

The collision between the United States and the USSR in the October, 1962 Cuban missile crisis signaled almost 50 years ago that the possibility of a regional or global conflagration is real in the nuclear age. While the end of the cold war brought the era of superpower confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union to a close, the capacity for a cataclysmic collision is greater today with the proliferation of nuclear weapons to regional powers in East and South Asia and the Middle East. American President John Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev were able to steer their respective states away from a nuclear disaster in 1962; however, it is also possible for America, Russia, and China to confront one another again with the capacity to do more damage than was possible with previous generations of nuclear weapons.

The new leaders of these large states and their smaller, regional allies may not be so fortunate as Kennedy and Khrushchev in being able to steer their respective ships of state successfully through such crises with adversaries. There are also new challenges posed in today’s world by the less catastrophic (but no less significant) threats from severe economic dislocations, terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction, and ecological hazards associated with the processes of globalization, cultural rifts, and natural disasters. In order to prevent or manage them, states and their leaders involved in these events need to be able to diagnose the actions of others and make choices that lead to beneficial outcomes both for themselves and their neighbors.

The central problem in the twenty-first century is the difficulty of balancing the geopolitical reality that we are all neighbors, due to the proximity generated by military and economic technologies, against the psychosocial reality that we are still strangers in many respects who do not understand one another (Polk 1997; Weiner 2007; Suskind 2009). The proximity created by globalization enhances the importance of answering the following fundamental questions that students of world politics share. What are the causes of conflict, cooperation, domination, and submission outcomes among the actors in world politics? Which foreign policy decisions in the form of strategies, tactics, and moves by these actors lead to these outcomes as international relations? How are these relationships transformed or maintained by the decisions of states and leaders in world politics? These questions are puzzles that both policymakers and scholars must solve in order to manage or understand world politics, respectively, as a series of discrete foreign policy decisions by actors or as a set of international relations among them (Nye 1990, 2008; George 1993; Gelb 2010). We address both of these kinds of puzzles in this book.

On the one hand, we confront particular, real-world puzzles facing states and their leaders in the twenty-first century, e.g., the difficulty of other leaders in understanding decisions by “rogue” leaders and adopting policies that are likely to lead to peace and avoid war with them. We also investigate how leaders can organize the decision-making process inside states and among allies so as to make high-quality decisions and avoid sub-optimum outcomes in managing conflicts. We examine as well whether and how leaders of states learn to adapt their decisions to changing circumstances and actions by others in the political universe. On the other hand, we argue that general, theoretical solutions to these puzzles are relevant to scholars, as they attempt to understand such historical cases as instances of more general puzzles that are endemic to world politics. This latter task is the central focus of our book.

Our approach to the general puzzles of conflict, cooperation, domination, and submission in world politics is to examine them both from the perspective offered by the actors and from the system in which they act, i.e., as a set of microscopic foreign policy decisions by actors and as a set of macroscopic social relations among them. This dual approach is unified theoretically by the assumption that actors are systems, too. Leaders are individuals-as-actors with cognitive, emotional, and motivational subsystems that constitute an interior system of psychological relations comparable in complexity to the exterior system of states-as-actors and the social relations in which they are members (Wolfers 1962; Houghton 2007; Wendt 1999). The psychological processes of decision making and learning by leaders are emergent properties of an interior communication and control network, which interfaces with the social processes of cooperation and conflict that are the emergent properties of an exterior communication and control network. Both of these networks can be understood as complex adaptive systems of interaction with inter-related emergent properties (Axelrod and Cohen 1999; Mitchell 2009; see also Deutsch 1966, 1968; Burton 1969).

These features of our approach identify it as a social-psychological analysis of world politics, which employs a general systems theory to unify the understanding of the actors, actions, and relations that constitute foreign policy and international relations phenomena as puzzles to be solved. The dual focus on agents and their relations in world politics bridges the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis and the field of International Relations, thereby inviting comparisons with other approaches to the study of each of these phenomena. Our position with respect to such opportunities throughout this volume is that we invite comparisons that foster relations of coordination and cooperation rather than competition and conflict among these approaches (Walker 2003; Laudan 1977). All of the contributing authors attempt to link their efforts in various ways to other schools of thought in international relations theory and foreign policy analysis.

The general systems theory that informs and unifies our social-psychological approach is role theory. It has a long history in the disciplines of psychology and sociology as a psychosocial model of social life, which links actors occupying roles with other actors in counter-roles that collectively define a social system of symbolic and strategic interaction (McCall and Simmons 1978; Biddle 1979; Stryker and Statham 1985; Mead 1947; Goffman 1959). Together these disciplines also constitute the origins of the transdisciplines of social and political psychology in which our general approach is located (Sarbin and Allen 1968; Stryker and Statham 1985; Tetlock 1998; Sears et al. 2003).

The relevance of role theory for understanding world politics has been recognized since at least the 1930s (K. Holsti 1970; Walker 1987c; Thies 2010; Harnisch 2010). The application of role theory in the concluding chapters of this volume to synthesize and summarize the analyses of decision making and learning presented in earlier chapters identifies the important processes and relations that link psychological processes and social processes in world politics. These links are specified with insights from mathematical game theory models of symbolic and strategic interaction provided by the research program in operational code analysis, which examines the links between the political belief systems of leaders, the foreign policy decisions of states, and the international outcomes of cooperation, conflict, domination, and submission in world politics (Walker 2003; Schafer and Walker 2006a; Walker and Schafer 2010).

The general argument in this book is that the smaller, “world in their minds” of individuals as actors and the larger, “world of events” that states as actors inhabit are connected in interesting and important ways (Vertzberger 1990; Wendt 1999; Lake and Powell 1999a). Seeing those connections is partly a conceptual matter of having a unifying theory to anticipate the connections and partly an empirical matter of having the proper instruments to observe them. Our goal is to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical patterns that connect these two worlds. This effort engages a larger set of arguments about “behavioral IR,” which involves the relationship between the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis and the field of International Relations (Mintz 2007). In turn, the issues raised in this argument about the organization of knowledge in the domain of world politics touches on larger questions about the acquisition and organization of knowledge in the natural and social sciences within the framework of complex systems analysis (Mitchell 2009; Axelrod 1984; Jervis 1997). Therefore, we have framed our argument about the worlds of beliefs and behaviors in this book within the context of these two larger conversations.

Foreign Policy Analysis and Behavioral International Relations

Alex Mintz has advanced “behavioral IR” as an important social-psychological approach to Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and International Relations (IR). This approach identifies and solves some basic problems unique to the former as a subfield of the latter. Foreign Policy Analysis as an agent-centered, micropolitical study of decisions by leaders is usually subordinated to IR as a structure-oriented, macropolitical study of interactions in regional or global international systems. It is possible and even desirable to focus on the interactions of states as actors to analyze large-scale, long-term, historical trends and shifts in world politics. However, it is also appropriate to focus on individuals and small groups as actors within states and analyze the small-scale, short-term behaviors that produce patterns of continuity and change in larger political systems. It is particularly the case in foreign policy making, as so many major decisions affecting global politics are made by a small number of individuals.

The application of a behavioral approach to individuals as actors in world politics embodies a set of concepts, methods, and heuristics as a research program. We identify and present applications of these characteristics of “behavioral IR” within the context of the operational code research program in foreign policy analysis. Operational code analysis as a neobehavioral approach to politics focuses on the explanation of foreign policy decisions and their consequences by reference to two political worlds: (a) the external world of events, generated by the presence, power, and behavior of other actors; (b) the internal world of beliefs, generated by the cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes of leaders. A leader’s operational code or belief system connects these two worlds by representing the external world of events as philosophical beliefs about the nature of the political universe and by prescribing strategies, tactics, and moves based on instrumental beliefs for making decisions about the exercise of power vis-à-vis other actors in the political universe (Leites 1951; George 1969).

We identify operational code analysis as a neobehavioral approach, because it combines features of two older research programs or traditions in the study of foreign policy and international relations. It employs both the concepts of rationality and power and the concepts of beliefs, emotions, and motivations. These concepts and the theoretical perspectives that they engender are associated with rational choice and behavioral research programs, respectively, which have traditionally been viewed as rivals in the IR field and its subfield of FPA (Oye 1986; Downs 1989; Geva and Mintz 1997; Lake and Powell 1999a; Bueno de Mesquita and McDermott 2004). The former employs more structure-oriented theories of International Relations while the latter focuses primarily on agent-based theories of Foreign Policy Analysis.

Arguably, the rise of both rational choice and behavioral approaches to world politics have their roots in realist international relations theory (Bueno de Mesquita 1981; Vasquez 1983); however, their evolution as separate research programs has been the dominant pattern until very recent times when a relaxation in tensions between the rivals began to occur (Bueno de Mesquita and McDermott 2004; Levy 2003: Herrmann 2003). If this détente evolves into an entente of collaborative engagement across research programs, the result may well be a “new” (neo) behavioral approach in which the concept of rationality is informed, defined, and modeled by the concepts of beliefs, emotions, and motivations in applications to the study of international relations and foreign policy. The evolution of the research program in operational code analysis is an example of such a new alliance between these old rivals (Walker 2003).

Old Approaches to Foreign Policy Analysis

Traditional a...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PART I Foreign Policy Analysis
• PART II Foreign Policy Decision Making
• PART III Foreign Policy Learning
• PART IV Foreign Policy Dynamics
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX