respectability, theory, and foreign policy analysis

Respectability, Theory, and Foreign Policy AnalysisThe Study of Policy Formation by Raymond A. Bauer; Kenneth J. Gergen; The Making ofForeign Policy: An Analysis of Decision Making by Joseph Frankel; The Making of ForeignPolicy: East and West by Kurt London; Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy by James N.RosenauReview by: Bernard MennisThe Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jun., 1969), pp. 278-285Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/173379 .

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Respectability, theory, and foreign

policy analysis: a review

Raymond A. Bauer and Kenneth J. Gergen (eds.), The Study of Policy Formation New York: Free Press, 1968. Pp. 380. $9.95.

Joseph Frankel, The Making of Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Decision Making

London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Pp. 231. $1.75.

Kurt London, The Making of Foreign Policy: East and West Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965. Pp. 368. $3.95.

James N. Rosenau (ed.), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy New York: Free Press, 19167. Pp. 340. $8.50.

BERNARD MENNIS Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

One characteristic that distinguishes the foreign policy literature of the last two decades from the work done previously is its explicit concern with theory construction. The sense of seriousness and urgency which typically accompanies such explorations indicates a general disenchantment felt by scholars regarding the state of the art. In- terest in theory building was, and continues to be, stimulated by the belief that the development of a respectable discipline is associated initially with an examination of internal properties (i.e., approaches, concepts, methods). Achievements at this "pretheory" level then provide the foundation for fruitful theoretical speculation and empirical investigation.

Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to

vitalize foreign policy analysis was the presentation by Snyder and his associates of their "decision-making approach." Since the publication of their monograph in 1954 (Snyder et al., 1954, 1962), several attempts have been made to indicate where and how the framework may be employed (Snyder, 1958; Snyder and Robinson, 1961; Robinson and Snyder, 1965). Despite such suggestions, "only one empirical application of the framework has ever found its way into the literature of the field" (Rosenau, 1967a, p. 194); that is the investigation of The Korean Decision by Paige (1968). It has become increasingly clear that this circumstance is no accident and that Paige's effort may continue to stand alone, because the "'deci-

CONFLICT RESOLLUTION VOLUME XIII NUMBER 2



DISCUSSIONS AND REVIEWS 279

sion-making approach" as originally formulated contains a fundamental deficiency which seriously circumscribes its ability to inspire empirical research (Patchen, 1965; Rosenau, 1967a). Rather than providing foreign policy analysts with systematic theoretical speculation upon which they could build, its main achievement has been to prod investigators to consider a number of variables that had been given little if any attention. Many researchers immediately recognized the validity of Snyder's point. But once the point was made, and digested by scholars, little else was forth- coming that gave theoretical or operational form to the insights contained in the initial monograph.

With this thought in mind, it becomes somewhat painful to read Frankel's The Making of Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Decision-Making. As the second part of the title suggests, Frankel is heavily indebted to Snyder for providing the framework for his descriptive analysis. In the preface, Frankel argues that traditional (i.e., histor- ical) approaches to the study of foreign policy are inadequate and what is needed is a "model" to serve as "a convenient frame of reference" (p. vii). The so-called "model" as outlined in the first chapter carefully follows Snyder's ground-breaking effort. Some illustrative examples are: "Foreign policy consists of decisions" and "decisions take place in the decision-maker's mind" (p. 1); "Environment (or, interchangeably, setting) is used as a description of all en- vironing factors" (p. 3); and "a distinction is therefore made between psychological and operational environments, the former as apperceived by the decision-makers, the latter as apperceived by an 'omniscient observer'" (p. 4). The three determinants of state behavior posited by Snyder (social structure, the external setting, and the internal setting) reappear in Frankel as

the foci respectively of chapters III and IV, V and VI. Frankel concludes with three chapters titled "The Pre-Decisional Stages," "The Choice," and "The Post-Decisional Stages."

It is painful to read Frankel primarily because, in his wish to reject traditional modes of analysis, he has rather uncritically bought the "decision-making" framework without bothering to distinguish its strong points and shortcomings. He states that "the approach adopted in this analysis is an attempt to interpret international politics in terms of decision-making but in a non-technical manner and with a minimum of special terminology" (p. viii). What emerges, consequently, is much "traditional" material now translated into the new vocab- ulary and parading under adapted titles such as "definition of the situation." Thus the book represents no real advance in theory or substance when compared to Snyder's work of the early 1950s (Sapin and Snyder, 1954; Snyder and Furniss, 1954). The main contribution of Frankel's work evidently is diffusion rather than in- novation. It introduces the "decision-making approach" to British students in a rather simplified and faithful way.

Kurt London also is interested in The Making of Foreign Policy. Unlike Frankel, however, London seems rather oblivious to any theoretical deficiency in the field, and to the contributions of such scholars as Snyder, Sapin, Modelski, Rosenau, Hilsman, and Huntington. The latter authors appear nearly exclusively as additional readings within the "Selected Bibliography" presented at the end. I detected little attempt to incorporate their ideas or findings within the text itself. London's "purpose was to investigate the machinery by which foreign policies are evolved, formulated, and ap- plied." The format employed can be de- scribed as conventional pre-"pretheory"



280 BERNARD MENNIS

(e.g., chapter I is called "The Elements of National Power"; chapter II, "Factors Con- tributing to Foreign Policy Making"). A good part of the book is taken up by comparative, institutionally-oriented descriptions of various national foreign policy-making systems. The results are not altogether satisfactory-London's analysis is rather elementary and superficial. Moreover, much of the material has been managed more effectively by others (e.g., Macridis, 1967; Black and Thompson, 1963). In sum, neither Frankel nor London makes a real contribution toward the development of theory or the provision of new data. Hence the disenchantment continues.

How far have we come regarding the study of foreign policy? In response to this question, Baldwin asserts near the end of his review of Hilsman's To, Move a Nation (1967) and Sapin's The Making of United States Foreign Policy (1966), two books which it was hoped would provide theoretical advancement, that "when I look around for explanations of American foreign-policy- making processes, I can find none that surpasses-or even equals-the book by Snyder and Furniss (1954) written fourteen years ago. . . Surely fourteen years of wrestl- ing with methodology should have led us somewhere other than to blind alleys" (1968, p. 391). A similarly harsh judgment is stated by Rosenau: "Foreign policy analysis lacks comprehensive systems of testable generalizations that treat societies as actors subject to stimuli which produce external responses. Stated more succinctly, foreign policy analysis is devoid of general theory" (1966, p. 32).

Rosenau, however, is not content simply to state his disenchantment. He is clearly determined to transform foreign policy analysis into a respectable area of inquiry by filling the void he claims now exists. His most ambitious attempts in that direc-

tion to date are his contribution to Ap- proaches to Comparative and International Politics (1966), and the two introductory chapters in Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy. In the former, Rosenau reveals in some detail his feelings concerning the present state of the art and what he thinks ought to be the near-term theoretical objec- tives of analysts in the field. In addition, and most significantly, he goes on to formu- late a five-dimensional "pretheory" for foreign policy analysis. The key part of the presentation of the "pretheory" occurs at the end, when Rosenau offers a paradigm in which he attempts to estimate the relative potency of the five variable dimensions (i.e., idiosyncratic, role, governmental, societal, and systemic), given the presence of particular forms of societies and types of issue- areas. Altogether, this persuasively written ground-breaking effort is provocative in its argument and promising with respect to the goals it is attempting to reach.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Rosenau's contribution in Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy. As its title suggests, the central focus here is to investigate the impact of the "internal setting" upon foreign policy-making. More specifically, the book developed from a symposium in which a number of distinguished scholars with well established credentials were in- vited to address their attention to the topic "Public Opinion and Foreign Policy." In the first two chapters, Rosenau describes the "organizing framework that was originally suggested to" the authors and to which they were expected to relate their efforts. The theoretical framework provided by Rosenau appears to predate (I mean this in a developmental and not necessarily a chron- ological sense) the "Pre-theories" article. No significant reference is made to the five variable classes and their relative potency, a central part of the pretheory as Rosenau

CONFLICT RESOLUTION VOLUME XIII NUMBER 2




presented it. Instead, Rosenau is partic- ularly concerned with the concept of issue- area, but not as it was presented in "Pre- theories." The key question Rosenau raises here is whether "foreign issues" and "domestic issues" constitute distinguishable issue- areas. This formulation is far less interesting than the one found in "Pre-theories." In fact, if "foreign issues" itself is a single distinguishable issue-area, then Rosenau's "pretheory" is reduced to proposing that the relative potency of the dimensions is associated entirely (?) with the particular form of society in which that policy is formulated.

After some nimble argumentation, Rose- nau says he has "developed an affirmative answer to our original question of whether the foreign and domestic areas are distinguishable from each other. In terms of the motives, roles, and interaction sequences they activate, foreign and domestic issues do seem to differ in significant ways" (p. 46). But this conclusion, even if accepted as proven, does not mean that the "issue- area" concept will necessarily serve to structure the contributed papers. As Rose- nau himself "must admit in all honesty . . . this volume reflects a failure of the issue- area concept to spark imaginations or orga- nize thoughts to a significant degree" (p. 7). Put somewhat differently, the framework provided by Rosenau had very little relevance. Although "each author was asked to re-examine the phenomena in his field and assess whether they function differently in the area of foreign policy than in the area of domestic policy," the predilection clearly was to do what one always did.

The lack of any connection between the

furnished framework and the papers which were contributed can only be partially

accounted for by referring to weaknesses in

the former. I think such a circumstance will

tend to occur whenever prominent scholars

who have explored a certain area with par-

ticular goals in mind are asked, on a single occasion, to consider how their research relates to another field. The temptation is frequently too strong to fill up much of one's paper with a report of previous findings and only peripherally to connect the latter meaningfully to the posited "symposium objective." In other words, I would be very surprised if the contributions in- cluded in Domestic Sources could have been integrated to a degree sufficient to satisfy Rosenau and readers. I am afraid that Rosenau will have to work the land himself now that he has planted the seed in "Pre- theories."

Moving to the positive side, let me say that the contributions in themselves are of high quality. Especially stimulating are the chapters by McCloskey, Rosenberg, and Lowi. As they have in the past, the former two authors provide many interesting insights into political attitude formation and change. I have neither the space here nor the inclination to attempt even a brief sum- mary of their findings. I leave that reward- ing task to the reader. Lowi's contribution is the most immediately useful for foreign policy theory because of the author's explicit attempt to answer the questions "What sort of a power pattern can be found in foreign policy? Is it elitistic, pluralistic, or mas- sified?" (p. 298). After an "inquiry into the events, institutions, and policies that explain our foreign policy establishment," Lowi concludes that there are "three pre- dictable subsystems of foreign policy-making..... The first is the elitist subsystem ... that prevails (a) in crisis and (b) in any noncrisis situation in which in the short run no internal resources are involved at all ... subsystem 2 is a logrolling pattern . .. decentralized and nonconflictive just as the elitist pattern is centralized and nonconflictive ... subsystem 3 is decentralized and conflictive -in a word, pluralistic" (pp. 324-325).



282 BERNARD MENNIS

This analysis, together with previous contributions by Huntington (1961), Ham- mond (1960; 1965), Hilsman (1959; 1967), and Ogburn (1960), among others, point to the development of foreign policy-making models of the type which Rosenau asserts is necessary for fruitful theoretical speculation. Moreover, Lowi's analysis appears directly

pertinent to Rosenau's pretheory, especially the part where he identifies what he believes to be the two determinants of the relative potency of the five dimensions. For example, the relative potency of "role" variables presumably will vary according to whether the subsystem is elitist, pluralist, or logrolling-or will it?

The Bauer and Gergen collection is similar to Rosenau's in that its content is clearly first-rate while, at the same time, the book does not satisfactorily integrate its various parts. The Study of Policy Formation may be divided into three overly autonomous sections. First, there are the excellent contributions by Bauer, who describes the development of "the study of policy formation," followed by Zeckhauser and Schaefer on "public policy and normative economic theory," Bower on "descriptive decision theory," and Schoettle on "the state of the art in policy studies." Each of the latter contains a valuable overview of where the relevant research has been and is going, and brief inventories of the approaches and concepts which thus far have emerged. In the process the authors necessarily identify a number of difficulties which need to be overcome before sophisticated modeling with respect to public policy formation can appear, difficulties which continue to resist satisfactory solution. And therein lies the main contribution of these papers.

For example, Rosenau (1967a) has com- mented upon the failure of "decision-making" to live up to its theoretical promise. But Bauer, partially relying upon Patchen's

(1965) previous remarks, goes one step further and shows that "decision-making" did not yield the fruit it intended because its very foundation is weak and its premises untenable (p. 11ff). Instead of considering individual decision-makers confronted with a set of known policy alternatives, Bauer suggests we "identify the points of 'leverage' in [the] system. By a 'point of leverage' we mean a person, institution, issue or subsystem of the overall system that has the capacity to effect a substantial influence on the output of the system" (p. 21). This "strategy of research" is an intriguing one, and certainly must be juxtaposed eventually with Rosenau's notion of the relative potency of variable dimensions. Unfortunately, Bauer does not sufficiently elaborate his point.

The main contribution that Zeckhauser and Schaefer and Bower make is to show just how difficult it is to employ classical normative and descriptive decision theory in the study of policy formation. Especially noteworthy is Zeckhauser and Schaefer's discussion of "best solutions" and "feasible alternatives" as ingredients in the utilization of economic choice models (p. 38ff). Prob- lems relating to the latter are serious with respect to the analysis of political policy- making, where even the preceding step of the identification of relevant policy-makers frequently is a difficult chore. Moreover, I might add that "politics" is as much concerned with that stage of the decision process during which it is decided whether a course of action is to be considered a "feasible alternative" and who should make that determination, as with the stage when actual alternative-selection takes place. Also very pertinent is their brief discussion of the differences between situations of "risk" (where the probabilities of each alternative are known) and "uncertainty" (where the probabilities are unknown); the latter is a

CONFLICT RESOLUTION VOLUME XIII NUMBER 2




more difficult yet far more prevalent circumstance confronting political policy-makers.

Bower's analysis of the various approaches to descriptive decision theory is divided into two parts. The first, which he titles "Theo- ries of Individual Choice," has such sub- headings as "The Classical Theory of the Firm," "The Theory of Consumer Demand," and "Utility Theory"; the second part con- cerns "Theories of Collective Choice" and describes the work of what he calls the "Econometricians," "Institutionalists" (he includes Barnard, Selznick, and Thompson here), and "Carnegie" (Simon, March), and others. His discussion, though necessarily brief, offers the beginning graduate student a valuable map to work in the "descriptive decision theory" field. Very surprising is the fact that Bower seems most pleased with the efforts of what he calls the "Scientific Political Scientists." My confidence in this judgment would be enhanced if he at least qualified his inclusion of Anthony Downs as a political scientist, and did not refer to "Theodore" Riker as the author of The Theory of Political Coalitions. Although claiming to describe "how contemporary social science theory analyzes the process of policy formulation and execution," Schoet- tle's chapter is almost entirely devoted to discussing the contributions of political scientists. She is partial to the Bauer and Parsons-Easton frameworks, and her critical comments often derive from this basis.

The second component of the book is composed of two contributions by Gergen. He sets out to show how Bauer's notion of "leverage points" may be used in the study of public policy formation. He develops a three-dimensional model (issue relevance, personal efficacy, and subphase resources) for the identification of leverage points. In this model, individuals in a society can be compared regarding "the degree of leverage that could be attributed to the person with

respect to a single issue" (p. 190). Gergen also identifies "several additional variables that appear to affect or modify major com- ponents of the model": system size and issue impact. Finally, he proposes a tech- nique for assessing leverage that entails identifying "issues of interest" and "formal participants," and limited use of reputa- tional procedures. Beyond some generally stated suggestions, Gergen does not provide specific operational rules for locating and distinguishing relevant, partially relevant, and irrelevant participants, or actually mea- suring "leverage." Indeed, his "theoretical model" is less that than an analytical framework. For example, no attempt is made (could one be made?) to generate some researchable hypotheses. Certainly the "leverage point model" is provocative and full of promise, but so was the decision- making approach and it did not lead to fruitful theoretical speculation or inspire many empirical studies. In this respect, I am afraid that Gergen's and Snyder's efforts have more in common than their diverse content suggests, or than Gergen would like to admit.

I presume that the three case studies by Schneider (on urban mass transportation), Furash (on technology transfer), and Geiger and Hansen (on foreign aid) which make up the third section of the book in part are intended to demonstrate the utility of Bauer and Gergen's approach to the study of policy formation. Unfortunately, the case studies are quite autonomous of the theoretical efforts contained elsewhere, much as was the case in the Rosenau collection. Furthermore, the methodology employed in each case is quite conventional (it typically does not deviate very far from the much criticized "group theory"-type reporting) and exhibits little evidence of the influence of any of the sophisticated normative or



284 BERNARD MENNIS

descriptive theories introduced in previous chapters of the book.

Why do we so often see this failure to link theory and empirical investigation in foreign policy analysis and related areas of study? I have to agree with Rosenau that part of the answer lies in the fact that what passes for theory frequently is something else, the positing of a "frame of reference" if you like or something similar to it. We need "pretheory" models which identify significant and interesting variables for analysis and suggest relationships which may exist between them. But beyond this, we have to insist that the theorist operationalize his theoretical concepts so as to suggest which of the many conceivable indicators are appropriate to his model. Only by this method can the splendid isolation which now exists between foreign policy-making theory and case study be reduced.

The factor which most tempers my opti- mism regarding the likelihood of such a development may be summarized by the single term "access." Foreign policy analysts have a difficult and often impossible task ahead of them when they attempt to collect data which would permit sophisticated, theoretically-inspired empirical study. After all, for various practical and political rea-

sons, scholars can interview only a small minority of those individuals engaged in foreign relations activities. And even those few feel they need to be guarded in their responses. Moreover, behavioral data are very difficult to come by (hence the re- peated emphasis on attitudinal studies), and roll-call-like data are nonexistent. Conse-

quently, it seems reasonable to expect that much of the future work in this area prob-

ably will make wide use of the laboratory (e.g., Burgess and Robinson's work at Ohio

State University). In the laboratory, investigators will be able to refine their theoretical conceptions in preparation to going into

the field, the so-called "real world." It seems to me that such pretesting is vital if the very limited "real world" interview and observation opportunities which exist for foreign policy analysts are not to be abused.

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HAMMOND, PAUL Y. "The National Security Council as a Device for Interdepartmental Coordination: An Interpretation and Ap- praisal," American Political Science Review, 54 (Dec. 1960), 899-910.

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respectability, theory, and foreign policy analysis

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