Operational Code Analysis and Foreign Policy Roles

Crossing Simon’s Bridge

Mark Schafer, Stephen G. Walker, Mark Schafer, Stephen G. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367650902
• eBook ISBN: 9781000348439
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, senior scholars and a new generation of analysts present different applications of recent advances linking beliefs and decision-making, in the area of foreign policy analysis with strategic interactions in world politics.

Divided into five parts, Part 1 identifies how the beliefs in the cognitive operational codes of individual leaders explain the political decisions of states. In Part 2, five chapters illustrate progress in comparing the operational codes of individual leaders, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, three US presidents, Bolivian president Evo Morales, Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and various leaders of terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East and North Africa. Part 3 introduces a new Psychological Characteristics of Leaders (PsyCL) data set containing the operational codes of US presidents from the early 1800s to the present. In Part 4, the focus is on strategic interactions among dyads and evolutionary patterns among states in different regional and world systems. Part 5 revisits whether the contents of the preceding chapters support the claims about the links between beliefs and foreign policy roles in world politics.

Richly illustrated and with comprehensive analysis Operational Code Analysis and Foreign Policy Roles will be of interest to specialists in foreign policy analysis, international relations theorists, graduate students, and national security analysts in the policy-making and intelligence communities.

Part I Beliefs and Roles in World Politics

1The Interface between Beliefs and Roles in World Politics

Stephen G. Walker and Mark Schafer

Introduction

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon proposed over 30 years ago the desirability of bridging the sciences of the mind (psychology) and the social sciences (political science) with the concept of bounded rationality (Simon 1985; see also Simon 1957, 1969). Lupia, McCubbins, and Popkin (2000, 12) commented 15 years later that “the scientific advances of the last four decades give us an opportunity that Simon did not have when he forged the concept of bounded rationality—the opportunity to build Simon’s bridge.” They identified advances in computer simulations of human information processing and new game theory models of decision-making under uncertainty as analytical tools that were not available to Simon when he first advocated this bridge. We began to apply those tools in the operational code research program over the next 5 years and presented the initial results in an edited volume (Schafer and Walker 2006).

We employ those same tools in this volume and report further progress toward Simon’s goal in the form of results from the research of a mix of senior scholars and a new generation of analysts over the past decade and a half. The results show that advances in the metrics of operational code analysis together with advances in the models of binary role theory “cross Simon’s bridge.” These advances synthesize the psychological beliefs of leaders and the social roles of states in world politics via statistical indices of bounded rationality and computational models of role theory dynamics to explain collective interaction patterns of cooperation and conflict by agents in world politics. The chapters in this volume report the results of different applications linking personality traits, operational code beliefs, and foreign policy roles in the subfield of foreign policy analysis (FPA) within the field of international relations (IR).

In this chapter, we present an outline of our main argument that an alliance of operational code metrics and role theory models can provide the actor-specific, situation-generic, and abstract-theoretical levels of knowledge necessary to link the individual cognitions of leaders and the collective decisions of states within an agent-based theory of strategic interactions in world politics (George 1993). The details that provide the context for our argument are elaborated in Chapter 2 along with a brief conceptual history and two possible future trajectories for the research program in operational code analysis. The subsequent chapters in Parts II, III, and IV of the volume contain studies of the different levels of foreign policy knowledge identified by George (1993). A concluding chapter in Part V provides an appraisal of our argument with various criteria for assessing progress in scientific research programs (Kuhn 1962; Lakatos 1970; Laudan 1977; Walker 2003; Jackson 2011).

Main Argument

Our main argument is made possible because of recent advances in operational code analysis and binary role theory (Walker, Malici, and Schafer 2011; Walker 2013, 2016; Malici and Walker 2017). The theoretical advances show how personality traits and operational code beliefs steer foreign policy decisions and evolve as larger patterns of foreign policy roles enacted by states as complex adaptive systems (CAS) in world politics. The methodological advances include the expansion of automated content analysis capabilities for retrieving operational code beliefs to include dictionaries in Spanish and Arabic as well as in English, the construction of new indices to measure operational code beliefs, and the disaggregation of belief indices to allow the targeted operational code analyses of strategic interaction patterns within different issue areas between role dyads plus facilitate the longitudinal analysis of belief changes (learning) and the evolution of roles in world politics.

The methodological advances accompany the collection, archiving, and coding of bigger data sets covering years, decades, and generations of statements and documents attributed to US leaders and presidential administrations, as well as other states and agents in world politics. The effects of these developments in instrumentation and data sets join with theoretical advances to extend the substantive advances in operational code analysis beyond the analysis of decisions by individual leaders. The scope of analysis extends to larger decision units such as single groups, bureaucratic organizations, and institutions within states plus the strategic interactions among dyads, triads, and larger ensembles of states, including other agents such as alliances, rivalries, terrorist networks, and international organizations in world politics.

The shift from the study of the belief systems of leaders as decision units to include states and other agents as decision units has led to a focus on role theory to organize and illuminate this expansion in the levels of analysis. Accompanying this expansion is a move to unify the study of FPA and IR as a hierarchy of CAS inspired by the earlier work of Simon (1969), Axelrod (1984), Jervis (1997), and Axelrod and Cohen (1999). FPA in this account focuses on subsystems of states as agents who interact within an overarching regional, functional, or global system and which are themselves constituted internally as subsystems of institutions, organizations, groups, and leaders. While recognizing that these agents are entangled as a single overarching system, the nature of their hierarchical organization also makes them “nearly decomposable,” i.e., the interactions within agents as subsystems are stronger than the interactions between those agents as members of the larger system (Simon 1969, 99–103).

The implications of this feature as an organizing principle for unifying FPA and IR are illustrated below with the following brief examples from the study of American domestic politics and US foreign policy. The US political system’s three main branches of government, Executive, Congress, and Judiciary, have stronger interactions among organizations within each branch than between each branch. Each branch constitutes a subsystem within the larger US political system. Their horizontal organization as coequal branches is based on the separation of powers between them and locates them at the apex of the vertical organization defined by the federal division of power in the US political system between Washington, DC, and the 50 state political systems. These separation and division patterns in the “span of control” (Simon 1969, 89) characterize different subsystems as levels of analysis in American politics. Nevertheless, they are also levels in a hierarchical political system that is “nearly decomposable” while remaining connected as a larger complex system by the exercise of social power both within and between the agents that compose it.

Similarly, the organizational features of “near decomposability” and “complex connectivity” enable FPA and IR to retain their identities as a subfield and field, respectively, while communicating and coordinating research efforts across levels of analysis in the study of US foreign policy. FPA scholars can analyze interactions among American institutions of government that make US foreign policy decisions to exercise social power in world politics, while IR scholars can study the United States as a member of regional or functional subsystems as agents within the larger global system of world politics.

Role Theory

Is it possible to move beyond this division of labor between FPA and IR to communicate and coordinate research efforts within the context of an effective theory of foreign policy that also interfaces with a unifying theory of world politics (Hudson and Day 2020, 209–215)? Role theory offers the promise of fulfilling this possibility in the study of world politics (Walker 1987, 241–259; Thies 2010; Walker, Malici, and Schafer 2011, 245–282; Walker 2013, 186–194; Walker 2016). Role theory is both a psychological and a social theory of human behavior. These two features make it especially suitable for the task of analyzing and synthesizing different levels of world politics ranging from the psychological characteristics and actions of individual world leaders to the social exercise of power among leaders, single groups, and coalitions of agents that constitute the states and subsystems in the global system of world politics.

Role theory as an empirical theory of IR has an underlying logical structure with the ability to generate different models of cooperation and conflict in world politics at multiple levels of analysis: system-oriented models of incentives and role demands, actor-centered models of role conceptions and expectations, and action-focused models of cues and role enactment. An emphasis at each of these levels of analysis on strategic interaction positions role theory as a theory of IR between Ego and Alter as well as a theory of their respective foreign pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Part I: Beliefs and Roles in World Politics
• Part II: The Operational Codes of World Leaders
• Part III: The Psychological Characteristics of US Presidents
• Part IV: Computational Models of Foreign Policy Roles
• Part V: Beyond Beliefs in World Politics
• Index