Feedback Effects in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis

Feedback Effects in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis
Paper prepared for presentation at the Second Global International Studies Conference
Ljubljana/Slovenia, 23-26 July 2008
- Work in progress -
Frank Gadinger
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
gadinger@politik.uni-mainz.de
Dirk Peters
Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
peters@hsfk.de
Abstract
The disciplinary split between IR theory and FPA has led to highly specialized research in
both fields which tends to leave out some interesting phenomena located at the interface of
both disciplines. In this paper we address one of these blind spots: feedback effects in foreign
policy. Feedbacks occur when a state's foreign policy affects the international context of that
state. These modifications of the state's context will in turn impact on the state's future
foreign policy decisions. From this a feedback loop can develop with foreign policy and
international context mutually affecting each other. Examples for such feedback processes
abound. The US-led war in Iraq which (unintentionally) contributed to an increasingly
deteriorating context for the US war against terrorism and necessitated more and more
adjustments in US foreign policy is only one obvious recent instance.
The paper will develop the basis for a heuristic to analyze such feedback effects. After an
overview over the detrimental effects of the split between IR and FPA we briefly review past
attempts to address the problem especially in the context of the agency-structure debate. We
argue that these attempts could be further improved if they tapped more systematically in
the wealth of research that has been done in IR theory and FPA. In the main part of the paper
we therefore review structuralist and agency-based approaches in IR theory and FPA and
discuss how their insights, taken together, could help us to analyze feedback effects.
Structuralist accounts point to potential sources of feedback processes in the international
system (stemming especially from international institutions, the international distribution of
power and the policies of other states). Yet to result in actual positive or negative feedback
loops these impulses from the international system must be responded to by agents at the
domestic level. Agency-based approaches help us understand how agents – embedded in
domestic structures - can creatively engage with these impulses through strategic or reflexive
learning and thus contribute to the reinforcement or disruption of feedback processes. In the
concluding section we sketch how we plan to proceed from these considerations to develop a
heuristic applicable in empirical research on feedback effects.
Keywords: process-oriented FPA; feedback effects; agency-structure relations

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1 Introduction
When the United States started their war against terrorism after the attacks of 9-11, their goal
was to defeat al-Qaeda or Islamist terrorism at large. At present, however, Islamist terror
groups seem to be on the rise in several parts of the world and there are many commentators
who contend that it was US policy that contributed critically to this development (Carothers
2003; El-Din Aysha 2005). It seems that today US foreign policy makers have to deal with the
unintended consequences of their own prior decisions. There are numerous other examples
of foreign policies producing such unintended consequences which negatively affected
future policy options; and there may be countless instances of positive feedbacks in foreign
policy and of intended consequences that also affected future policies but in a way that had
been anticipated by policy-makers. As a matter of fact positive or negative feedback effects
will occur wherever a state's foreign policy affects the international context in which it is
embedded, because it will have to make future foreign policy decisions within this altered
context.
Surprisingly enough, such interactions between context and action have rarely been
addressed in International Relations (IR) theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) alike.
Indeed, we would argue that it is this very disciplinary split between IR theory and FPA that
has rendered the interaction between states' context and state action a blind spot of theorydriven
research. IR theorists concern themselves primarily with the role of international
structures and with theorizing and demonstrating how such structures dispose similarly
placed actors towards similar actions. Consequently IR theorists tend to focus on “actorgeneral”
theory (Hudson/Vore 1995), i.e. to treat states as black boxes and to downplay the
role of agency in international relations. In contrast, FPA focuses on the domestic traits of
states and how they affect foreign policy. Thus foreign policy analysts use to employ “actorspecific”
theories (ibid.), struggling with the contingency of agency by analyzing the details
of foreign policy decision-making.
One result of this division of labor in theory construction is that long-term dynamics
which involve both the effects of context on action and of action on context cannot become
the focus of work. We argue that this is detrimental for understanding basic dynamics in
international relations and that therefore researchers should aim at bridging this disciplinary
divide. A focus on what we call feedback effects in foreign policy could help to explore how
insights from IR theory and FPA can be integrated to foster our understanding of long-term
dynamics in international relations. In this paper we will briefly discuss the problematic
effects of the split between IR theory and FPA; develop the concept of feedback effects that

idges the fields of IR and FPA; and discuss how insights from IR theory and FPA could
help to analyze feedback effects in foreign policy.
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2 In search of a bridge between structuralist IR theory and agency-centered FPA
IR theory and FPA: Structural vs. agency bias
The division of labor between FPA and IR theory has been lamented before. Especially the
structuralist bias of IR theory has repeatedly been a target of criticism. The most thorough
wave of criticism, however, the constructivist attack on mainstream IR in the late 1980s and
early 1990s has not resulted in a reduced emphasis on large-scale structures in IR theorizing.
Instead constructivism has also turned towards structuralism.
The pre-eminent approaches in the 1980s, neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism,
focused on the effect of international structures like anarchy, the distribution of power, of
interests and of information and on international institutions (for an overview see Baldwin
1993). It was the failure of this structuralist thinking to accommodate long-term international
change - the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of the bipolar international system
structure - that led to a forceful attack on structuralism in IR theory and to a reconsideration
of the importance of agency (Gaddis 1992/1993; Lebow 1995). A focus on structures alone,
the argument went, could account only for stability in the international system, but to reflect
the dynamics of change the role of agency in international relations had to be spelled out.
Alexander Wendt (1987) provided a powerful frame for this argument by introducing the
basic ideas of structuration theory (Giddens 1984) into the IR discourse.
Wendt's own substantive analysis of international relations, however, is instructive in
demonstrating how this critique of dominant IR approaches turned to an emphasis on
structures itself. In analyzing international relations Wendt did not follow up on his claim
that there was a constitutive relationship between structure and agency and that both
structure and agency should be awarded equal ontological status (Wendt 1987: 339). Rather,
in spelling out his social theory of international relations Wendt (1999) eventually fell back
into a mostly structuralist mode of analysis. His focus was on the impact of grand (social)
structures like the three cultures of anarchy, and on long-term cycles in international politics
rather than on the agency-level of foreign policy. His choice of four “master variables” as
explanations for structural change betrays a structuralist bias too with only of them, “selfrestraint”,
touching the dimension of agency at all (Herborth 2004).

Wendt’s moderate version of constructivism which privileges structures over agency
is characteristic of the bulk of constructivist literature in IR. Two basic strands in
constructivist theorizing can be distinguished and both have a structuralist focus. The
dominant variant of constructivism singles out basic aspects of the social world and treats
them as variables to account for policies or the outcomes of interactions. These approaches
follow the lead of Wendt and focus on aspects of social structure like norms
(Risse/Ropp/Sikkink 1999; Klotz 1995), or culture (Katzenstein 1996; Duffield 1998), thus
largely neglecting the moment of agency. Second, postmodern or poststructuralist
approaches aim at overcoming the causal and often determinist logic of such arguments and
to stress the process dimension of international relations. But even those scholars who
formulate accounts of foreign policy (Doty 1993; Weldes 1996) focus primarily on the role of
discourse and of texts and thus tend to reproduce the structuralist bias, especially by
connecting textual linkages relying on the idea of “intertextuality” (Hansen 2006: 55-72).
Agency is missing again.
In contrast to IR theory, FPA can proud itself to have always paid due respect to the
role of agency in international relations. FPA scholars rightly remind students of IR that IR as
a field of study has a ground beyond international structures and the interactions of states
because “all that occurs between nations and across nations is grounded in human decision
makers acting singly or in groups” (Hudson 2005: 1, emphasis in original). Consequently, as
Valerie Hudson (2005: 2 f.) has pointed out,
“states are not agents because states are abstractions and thus have no agency. Only
human beings can be true agents, and it is their agency that is the source of all
international politics and all change therein. […] 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 few mainstream IR theories over the decades
of the Cold War placed human beings in the theoretical mix. Adding human decision
makers as the key theoretical intersection confers some advantages generally lacking
in IR theory.”
4
The problem with FPA is that it is prone to a similar fallacy as most IR approaches.
Instead of overemphasizing structural effects, however, FPA has a tendency to exaggerate
the impact of agency. FPA has focused on decision-makers and their immediate milieu to
such an extent that it has tended to ignore that decision-makers and the states for which they
make decisions are embedded in a wider structural context that has important constraining
and also constitutive effects. However, the wake-up calls to reconsider the relationship
between agency and structure were much more muted in FPA (Carlsnaes 1992) than in IR
theory where the debate is still going on (Doty 1997; Wight 1999, 2006).

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Bridging the gap: between abstract recommendations and narrow approaches
The disciplinary divide between structure-centered IR theory and agency-centered FPA is
artificial and the agent-structure debate has certainly served done much to clarify that
focusing on one side of the coin may prevent us from gaining a fuller understanding of
international relations dynamics. Consequently there is no lack of calls for more theoretical
integration between structuralist and agency-centered approaches, between IR theory and
FPA. Bryan Mabee (2007), for instance, suggests combining the macro-oriented tradition of
historical sociology with micro-historical sociological analysis (historical institutionalism), an
idea which would make sense for IR studies as well. Peter Howard (2004) proposes a
process-oriented foreign policy analysis focusing on language games in the interaction of
states. David Patrick Houghton (2007) suggests reinvigorating the study of foreign policy
decision making through a constructivist approach. For him social constructivism provides
the most logical base from which to launch a revitalized approach to FPA, especially the
cognitive-psychological tradition, to connect FPA as a free-floating enterprise to the main
theories of IR. Another small group of authors propose more generally a process-oriented
and dialectic thinking in IR to overcome the Westphalian understanding that focuses almost
exclusively on states as actors (Jackson/Nexon 1999; Cederman/Daase 2003; Guillaume
2007) by integrating theoretical insights of different sociologists (Elias, Simmel).
Yet these calls for integration have not resulted in viable, widely accepted research
strategies that would help us to appreciate the interplay of structure and agency in empirical
research. One of the reasons for this may be that the debate has been couched in highly
abstract terms which highlight the dilemmas of empirical research rather than providing
ways to deal with them. The emphasis that has been placed on the co-constitution of agency
and structure has left empirical research with the problem that it will never be able to look at
both sides of this constitutive process at the same time. The solution offered by structuration
theory is "bracketing", i.e. to set the problem aside and start with the analysis of given
structures or given agency, keeping in mind that this is a simplification of more complex
social processes (Giddens 1984: 288-293). The downside of this solution is that it allows
actual research to slip back into a structuralist or agency-centered mode and leave analysis of
what has been bracketed to "further research".
There are some studies which have nonetheless attempted to focus on the interplay of
structures and agency in concrete empirical settings. The only problem with them is that they
have not generated much additional research in their wake. We suspect as the reason for this
that they have developed highly specific approaches which may be considered by some as

6
too narrow to deal with the generic problem of the relation between context and action.
Nonetheless these studies demonstrate very well the added value of including both aspects,
structure and agency, in one analysis. Consider two studies as illustrations: Michael Barnett's
(1999) study of Israel’s foreign policy change, which led it to embrace the Oslo accords; and
the work of Gunther Hellmann and his team (2005, 2006) analyzing Germany’s embedded
EU foreign policy.
Barnett (1999) demonstrates that pure agency-oriented explanations (Yitzhak Rabin as
heroic individual), domestic explanations (changes in the party politics) as well as pure
systemic explanations (shifts in the international and regional environment) are too
deterministic to grasp the dynamics of Israel's foreign policy change towards the Oslo Peace
Accords. They all fail to explain how it was possible for Rabin "to create, however
temporarily, a cultural space in Israeli politics in which a withdrawal from the territories
became desirable and legitimate" (Barnett 1999: 6) and how a compromise with the
Palestinians in the peace process became a realistic option. To understand this outcome,
Barnett combines a structuralist constructivist reading (normative structure generates and
constrains what can be considered legitimate action) with a more agency-centered version of
rational-choice institutionalism (actors calculate optimal policy paths in an institutional
environment). In his analysis he demonstrates how the two levels are interlinked: The
normative structure structures action, without determining it, by providing e.g. legitimate
strategies for action. Within this structured space actors can act strategically and even aim at
rewriting the cultural landscape. Relying on this linkage, Barnett is able to explain the
change in Israeli politics as an attempt of Rabin and others to alter the normative structure in
which they were embedded and which enabled them in the first place to pursue their
strategies. They attempted to create a connection between a Zionist and liberal Israeli
identity and the desirability of a territorial compromise with the Palestinians. These strategic
moves created a cultural space and opened up a new political opportunity structure.
Barnett thus focuses on how actors can intentionally employ the generative and
constraining implications of the structure in which they are embedded to modify these very
structures. In contrast, Gunther Hellmann and his team in their study of Germany's
European policy pay particular attention to the unintended consequences which action can
produce. They argue that the German position in the European integration process has
shifted during the 1990s and argue that this shift can neither be explained by an exclusively
agency-centered approach as the result of deliberate strategic planning nor by a structuralist
account pointing to structural shifts at the systemic level. Rather they point to the long-term
interplay of German policies and the EU's institutional structures. To analyze this interplay

7
they develop an interactionist framework that centers around the idea that the relative
weight of structures and agency is contingent. Hellmann et al. (2005) start with their
conception of agency which they derive from philosophical pragmatism (Dewey, Joas). From
a pragmatist point of view agency stresses the creativity of social action and the contingency
of structural configurations. Whereas in routine situations actors follow implicit rules for
action based on past experiences which reproduce given structures, they are confronted with
uncertainty in problematic situations, in which they cannot fall back on known rules and are
forced to deal with the crisis moment and to act creatively. To analyze the interplay of
structures and agency they rely on this distinction between crisis and routine situations
which allows them to perform a sequential analysis in which they bracket either structures or
agency. Thus, the analysis of Germany’s EU policy can be split in “summits” and “hills”, on
the one hand, and "valleys" on the other hand. Whereas "summits" represent situations of
structural crisis in which the details of the EU's institutional structure are open to
modification and in which there are opportunities for creative agency to contribute to such
modifications, “valleys” stand for routine situations in which action is tightly linked to
existing structures. Employing this mode of analysis Hellmann et al. can demonstrate how
during summits Germany contributed to changes in its structural context which later
affected German policies - not always in ways anticipated by German decision-makers
before. Specifically their analysis shows how Germany had been pushing for the creation of
EU institutional structures in the realms of defence and asylum policy which then impinged
on German policies in partially unintended and unanticipated ways and contributed to
Germany's move "from vanguard to laggard" in European integration (Hellmann et al. 2005:
160). Thus the interactionist analysis offers a fresh look at the long-term dynamics in
European integration and Germany's EU policies.
The analyses of Barnett and Hellmann et al. demonstrate how heeding the calls for
integration of structure and agency-based accounts can provide additional analytical
leverage. However they also highlight a particular dilemma of the literature dealing with
this issue. There is, on the one hand, a debate about the relation of structure and agency and
about the desirability of integrating IR theory and FPA that is conducted in highly abstract
terms. On the other hand, there are (few) empirical analyses dealing with the problem on the
basis of highly specific, tailor-made approaches which have hitherto generated little
additional research. In this paper we try to examine the space between these two extremes.
We do this because we suspect that one of the reasons why attempts to look into the
interplay of structures and agency, context and action, have remained so rare is exactly that
the discussion of the problem has been couched either in overly abstract terms (such as in the

8
agency-structure debate in IR) or has focused on highly specific approaches to deal with it
(such as the pragmatist conception of Hellmann et al. or the institutionalist-constructivist
framework of Barnett). We would argue that IR theory and FPA have come forth with a
multitude of broadly applicable approaches that could be utilized in conceptualizing and
analyzing the interplay of context and action. Hence our goal in this paper is to present an
inventory of IR theory and FPA and to demonstrate how approaches that have been
developed in these disciplines could be utilized to shed light on the interplay of structures
and action.
To be able to tap into the amazing wealth of research that has been done in FPA and
IR theory we first of all strip the agency structure problem of some of its abstraction. Instead
of pondering how structure and agency constitute each other we will focus on the question of
how structure affects action and vice versa. This is a question of more manageable
proportions and, in particular, it is a question that can be tackled in empirical research and
on which those few studies which have dealt empirically with the agency-structure problem
have focused anyways. We propose to conceptualize this relation between structure and
action as one of feedback effects. The concept of feedback effects is intended to capture the
basic intuition that policies may affect those structures which helped to bring them about in
the first place, a phenomenon from which different kinds of positive or negative feedback
loops may result. To better understand what kinds of feedback effects may exist and how
they may come about, we look into both IR theory and FPA. While IR theory will help us to
understand the basic mechanics of feedback effects in international relations, the effects that
action may have on structures and the potential effects from structures on action; FPA will
provide tools to introduce the agency dimension and to better understand how the structural
conditions are actually translated into action.
In what follows, we will first of all outline the idea of feedback effects in some more
detail (section 3). We will then translate the general idea of feedback effects into a heuristic
for analyzing feedback effects in international relations. To this end, we will first review IR
theory to learn how different aspects of international structure may impact on, and
themselves be affects by, state action (section 4). A review of FPA will help us to close the
feedback loops by providing us with different approaches to understand how structural
conditions may actually translated in state action (section 5). Both elements together will give
us a basic understanding of which types of feedback effects may emerge in international
relations and how they may be brought about. We conclude with a summary of the
theoretical argument and outline how starting from these ideas a heuristic could be
developed that can be applied in empirical research.

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3 Feedback effects: some general considerations
From our point of view the concept of feedback effects will be useful for both
conceptualizing the interplay of international structures and state action and as a frame for
linking insights of IR theory and FPA. This section will elaborate in some more detail why
we think feedback effects are a useful concept in these respects before we outline the
building blocks of an actual heuristic for analyzing feedback effects in the following sections.
What do we mean when we say feedback effects? We rely on a straightforward
definition of a feedback as a process in which some originating factors produce a result
which, in turn, affects the factors that brought it about in the first place. A feedback may thus
be thought of as a simple circuit, a loop which connects source and results in both directions
(figure 1). The effect brought about by such a feedback may a strengthening or reinforcement
of the original factors (positive feedback) or a modification or weakening of the original
factors (negative feedback).
originating factors
results
Figure 1: Feedback loops
Feedbacks can be encountered in many areas of the physical and social world. Most
commonly known feedbacks occur in acoustics, when a microphone is connected to a
loudspeaker and the speaker's output directly enters the microphone. Whoever has become
witness of such a feedback will easily realize that our use of the term "positive feedback" has
no normative implications whatsoever. These feedbacks are often unintentional although
they also may be brought about intentionally (such as in Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock
performance of the Star Spangled Banner) - another important general feature of feedback
effects. In the social sciences it was in particular systems theory that has examined feedbacks
and their effects in the social realm (for an overview: Richardson 1991). Here feedbacks refer
to situations in which e.g. the output of a political system affects the input into that system.
Transferred to the realm of international relations and foreign policy, feedbacks occur when
a state's foreign policy affects the conditions under which this state formulates its foreign

10
policy. A state's policies may, for example, contribute to the stabilization or disintegration of
an existing international institution which may develop into self-reinforcing positive or
negative feedback. Liberal or protectionist trading practices, for instance, may have positive
or negative repercussions on the liberal international trade regime. These feedbacks may
over time intentionally or unintentionally stabilize or erode the embedded liberalism which
is at the core of this regime (Ruggie 1992).
What makes the concept of feedback effects particularly interesting for our purpose is
that it highlights an aspect of the social world whose analysis requires the combination of
both structure- and agency-oriented theory. A theory purely focused on agency will
obviously be unable to account for feedback effects because it simply cannot reflect the
structural effects of action which are a key component of feedback loops. On the other hand,
merely structuralist theories will at best present a truncated view of feedbacks and their
effects. If they can account at all for feedback effects they will do so in an either deterministic
or mechanistic fashion according to which structure begets structure. In a deterministic view
actors are simply viewed as slaves of structure who faithfully translate structural imperatives
into action. Consequently the theory can account for feedbacks, e.g. by postulating that
certain institutions will make actors comply with their rules which stabilizes the institution
etc. The result is a static view of the world in which change is hard if not impossible to
account for. In a mechanistic view the assumption about actors is somewhat relaxed. The
structuralist account of feedback effects then, however, has a crucial missing link. Structural
theory can only spell out how structures may dispose actors towards certain actions and how
those actions (if they occur) may have certain structural implications in turn. It may assume
that most actors by and large will tend to follow this disposition. But if and how the
disposition is actually translated into action—which would be the crucial precondition of
feedbacks actually occurring—is a blind spot of this kind of structuralist theorizing. This is
the crucial limitation e.g. of neorealist balance-of-power theory (Waltz 1979), which
postulates a certain form of feedback effects (the recurrence of power balances under
anarchy) yet is agnostic towards the actor-level and thus can never account for the full causal
loop from structural conditions over state action to structural effects and so on. This is where
agency-based theory kicks in and where, from our point of view, FPA can make a crucial
contribution to the grand analyses of IR theory. Decision-makers will respond to structural
incentives but in responding they do not simply obey what structure demands. Rather they
are themselves embedded in domestic contexts which affect their responses. Moreover they
bring an irreducible creative capacity to decision-making. Analyzing exactly this complex
situation is the home ground of FPA.

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These considerations suggest that feedback effects should be analyzed sequentially
(see also Hay 2002: 148 ff.). Analysis of feedback effects would thus proceed from a certain
structural environment of a state and its potential effects on state action; then employ the
toolbox of agency-based theory to analyze the state response; and return to structural theory
to understand how state action may affect international structure (positively, negatively)—
with which step the loop begins again. Such a sequential analysis will then not only serve to
integrate insights from IR theory and FPA but also help us to achieve our original goal of
understanding the interplay of international structures and state agency in a more adequate
way than a purely structuralist account, which will necessarily be biased towards structural
continuity and at best propose a mechanistic view of feedback effects; and a purely actororiented
approach, which will tend to be blind against underlying context effects structuring
state action.
To perform such a sequential analysis of feedbacks we can employ the twin toolboxes
of structuralist theorizing and more actor-oriented theorizing. In what follows we will
review these toolboxes and try to find ways of systematically linking them to be able to
analyze feedback effects. The result will be a heuristic framework for analysis that can guide
researchers to employ insights from different strands of theorizing to gain a fuller
understanding of long-term feedback dynamics. This framework will suggest various ways
of combining these tools and the various combinations will reveal different aspects of
potential feedback mechanisms in International Relations. Reflecting on the framework we
will also be able to identify different typical kinds of feedback effects in international
relations which may guide further research.
4 Feedback effects in foreign policy: specifying the model
The general idea translated
A transfer of the generic idea of feedback effects to any policy field requires that we be more
specific about its basic components. We proceed from the assumption that feedbacks link a
state’s foreign policy with the context that is relevant for formulating this policy. While the
concept of foreign policy is rather unproblematic, it is more difficult to specify is the relevant
context, i.e. the context which may affect foreign policy decisions. Of course, identifying this
context has been the prime trade of FPA, yet unfortunately foreign policy research has not
been as conclusive in this respect as one may wish.

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Heuristically, we follow the bulk of the foreign policy literature in conceiving of
foreign policy formulation as embedded in a variety of contexts which can become more or
less important for ultimate foreign policies. They can be thought of as different layers
grouped around the decision-making center. They range from the characteristics of small
decision-making groups over the institutional characteristics of the foreign-policy making
system at large and the broader characteristics of state and society to different aspects of the
international environment (Hudson 2007). In the context of research about feedback effects in
foreign policy analysis, however, not all of these layers will have the same relevance. Rather
we can distinguish more immediately relevant aspects of contexts from other aspects which
may be only indirectly linked to feedback effects. Since foreign policy is, by definition,
directed at the international environment of a state, its international context will be most
directly relevant for the emergence of feedback effects. Foreign policy will more directly
affect international factors, e.g. a state's international institutional environment, than it will
impact on the state's domestic characteristics. Hence we focus on states' international
environments in this paper to discuss feedback effects. This is not to say that there may not
also be more indirect feedback effects that involve a state's domestic characteristics.
Interestingly enough the international context of states is only rarely addressed as a
causal variable in foreign policy research. FPA has tended to look first and foremost at the
domestic causes of foreign policy—so much so that some even equate the whole of FPA with
research on the internal determinants of a state's external actions (Hudson/Vore 1995;
Hudson 2005). This is not to say, however, that there has been no research at all on the
international determinants of (or, better, influences on) foreign policy. Research on these
resulted in particular from IR debates, either by implication or through explicit attempts to
cross-fertilize FPA with insights from IR. This research has pointed to three broad
dimensions of a state's international environment that will be relevant for its foreign policies:
a state's institutional environment; its place in the international distribution of power; and
the preferences and policies of other states. These three dimensions, which we will address
in greater detail below, help us to arrive at a specification of the feedback effects that may
occur in foreign policy.

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Figure 2: Foreign policy and three dimensions of international context
In what follows, we will address the six arrows in figure 2, i.e. we will spell out how
foreign policy may be affected by each of the three dimensions of a state's international
environment and how a state's foreign policy itself may contribute to the shaping of these
dimensions. Before we start to examine these three dimensions in more detail, however, we
need to highlight one important general feature of feedback effects in foreign policy. They
will not be determinate but contingent upon the particular setting in which they occur. This
is so because neither the link from the international context to foreign policy nor that from
foreign policy back to the international context can plausibly be construed as a determinate
one. Context does not determine state policies. This can be seen empirically and the reasons
for it have been discussed theoretically. Empirically, the (little) research that has been done
on the relation between international context and foreign policies has almost never found a
strong invariable relation between the two. Neither the foreign policies of rising nor those of
declining great powers nor those of small states can be exclusively traced back to these states'
position in the international distribution of power (e.g. Rose 1998, Rittberger/Wagner 2001,
Hey 2003). Nor can the policies of economically dependent states be explained solely by their
economic dependencies (e.g. Hey 1995; Braveboy-Wagner/Snarr 2003). From a theoretical

14
perspective, this absence of a direct determinate link between context and action is easily
explicable. Foreign policy decision-makers are simply exposed to more influences than just
the international environment in which a state is embedded. Moreover, international context
cannot leave its direct imprint on foreign-policy decisions. Rather, information about
external influences needs to be digested in the foreign-policy making system. This processing
of external influences does not leave them undistorted as has been demonstrated time and
again by the decision-making approach to FPA.
Regarding the second part of the feedback loop the non-determinate character is even
more obvious. A single state's policy cannot determine the international context. All a single
state can possibly have is a more or less strong influence on the shape of the international
context. Even the strongest state in the system can hardly be expected to permanently
pressure other states in particular policies and thus also to single-handedly determine the
shape of international institutions and of the international distribution of power. Rather the
international context is shaped by the interaction of a variety of actors.
Taken together, neither the link from international context to foreign policy nor that
from foreign policy to international context is simply determinate. 1 This is not to say that
there are no effects in one or the other direction. Yet these effects are not determinate, they
are contingent on other factors not incorporated in our analytical framework (and possibly
unpredictable). The same, then, holds for the feedback effects that may evolve between
foreign policies and context. Contingency is thus an important aspect of feedback effects in
foreign policy.
There and back again I: International institutions and foreign policy
We use the concept of international institution here in a very wide sense, indicating basically
the stable rules and norms that govern international interactions. Such broad definitions
have been widely employed in institutionalist research with rationalist approaches viewing
institutions mostly as exogenous constraints for interaction (e.g. North 1990) and
constructivist approaches highlighting in particular their enabling and constitutive aspects
(e.g. Kratochwil/Ruggie 1986, Duvall/Wendt 1989).
1 This is a variation of the level-of-analysis problem as it has been discussed by J.D. Singer (1961).
What becomes clear here is that a feedback perspective can on the one hand incorporate context
variables and on the other hand still avoid the pitfalls of many structuralist accounts. Such accounts
have been extensively criticized for being (a) determinist and (b) unable to account for change. In a
feedback perspective change is possible (albeit likely to be incremental) because actions do not
contribute to mere reproduction of contextual conditions, but may contribute to their modification.

15
There is a suspicious lack of FPA studies that would systematically address the
relation between international institutions and foreign policies. Even those FPA textbooks
which do address the international environment of a state tend to leave international
institutions completely out of the picture (e.g. Hudson 2007, Smith et al. 2008). In IR theory
on the other hand a huge amount of research has been done on institutions since the 1980s,
but these studies have mainly focused on the question of how certain kinds of institutions
emerge in international politics and less on how they affect foreign policies. 2 Nevertheless
the broad IR literature on international institutions has some obvious implications for foreign
policy research. We will spell them out and rely on these implications to enhance our
understanding of the feedback effects that may develop between states' foreign policies and
international institutions.
Institutionalist research has brought out two basic ways in which institutions can
affect states and their policies. First, institutions can be understood as constitutive of states
and their goals. Research on the institution of sovereignty, for instance, has demonstrated
how this basic institution has evolved and shaped international politics (Onuf 1991,
Bartelson 1995). Sovereignty constitutes states as entities in the first place. It also constitutes
states as certain kinds of entities which are prone be guided by particular goals in their
external policies, especially by safeguarding their sovereignty. Other, less general
institutions have comparable effects. Membership in the EU and thus participation in its
institutions constitutes states as EU members, which is important for how others interact
with them and how they themselves respond. Such institutions thus provide the condition of
possibility for the existence of particular actors.
Institutions, secondly, regulate behavior, i.e. actors (of which we now think as preexisting,
given entities) adjust their behavior to their institutional environment. Institutions
thus may make states lower their tariffs, cut their industries' carbon dioxide emissions or
solve their disputes without recourse to military force. Institutionalist research discusses two
general ways in which institutions can become effective in terms of regulating behavior.
Institutions may work as a constraint on the strategic behavior of states. In IR theory this
conception has been elaborated especially in the context of institutionalist regime theory (e.g.
Krasner 1983, Keohane 1984, Hasenclever et al. 1997: 23-135). In this conception institutional
rules alter the matrix of the costs associated with different paths of action. States, rationally
calculating the optimal policy against the background of a given preference-ordering, will
respond to these changes by adjusting their behavior. Typically this strand of institutionalist
theorizing has pointed out that cooperative institutions make cooperation more attractive for
2 The few exceptions include Duffield (1992), Simmons (2002).

16
states by lowering transaction costs, e.g. by providing information or explicit standards of
behavior, and by increasing costs for non-cooperative behavior, e.g. by sanctioning this
behavior or associating reputational costs with it. Consequently, institutions constrain noncooperative
behavior and provide incentives for cooperative behavior without altering
actors' preferences over outcomes.
Institutions may also regulate behavior because actors have internalized their norms
and consider it appropriate to act in certain ways and not in others. EU members, for
instance, share a multitude of norms which demarcate appropriate and inappropriate
behavior, a partly implicit and partly explicit list of "do's" and "don'ts" that is not externally
enforced but internalized by EU members. The most fundamental of them is that EU
members do not use military force against each other (this is at the heart of the concept of
"integration", see Deutsch et al. 1957). There are other implications of EU membership, on
which research more or less agrees. EU membership, for instance, appears to entail a general
commitment to a liberal trading order or a particular conception of the EU's role on the
world stage (Holzinger et al. 2005: 227 ff.). Membership in other organizations and thus
participation in other international institutions appears to have comparable implications, as
has been demonstrated for members of NATO (Risse-Kappen 1996), UNESCO (Finnemore
1996: 34-68) and others.
The regulative effect of institutions does not necessarily adhere to one of these
mechanisms alone. As socialization research has pointed out, for instance, strategic
adherence to institutionalized norms may over time evolve in internalization of those norms.
In such cases actors begin to adhere to institutional constraints for strategic reasons, but by
doing so over and over again adherence to the institutional norm becomes a habit and over
time they internalize the norm so that they adhere to it not for strategic reasons but because
this is just what a member of their group does (Schimmelfennig 2001; for an example see
Jørgensen 1997).
It is interesting to note that almost none of the institutionalist research in IR has been
translated to a foreign policy perspective. Regime theory, for instance, has been primarily
concerned with the emergence and stabilization of cooperation at the interaction level but
rarely been made explicit as a framework for analyzing foreign policies. The implications of
institutionalist theory for FPA, however, are clear, especially when the regulative dimension
of institutional effects is concerned: International institutions affect state policies by both
providing standards of appropriate behavior and by altering the costs and benefits
associated with different paths of action.

17
What is important now for the analysis of feedback effects is that not only may
institutions affect state behavior but also the other way round: states' policies themselves
may affect institutions. Regime theory again provides us with a useful starting point to
ponder this aspect of the feedback loop. In regime theory the impact of states on
international institutions is particularly obvious: States create institutions, they define the
principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures that make up the regime. Changes
in the institution are made by explicit agreement among participating states. To be sure, the
link between state policy and institution is not determinate. After all, rules are made by more
than just a single state. Moreover, the influence of some states will be greater than that of
others (see, for example, the development of the world trade regime over the past decades).
Yet while there are certainly differences in degree it is obvious that state policies affect
institutions when these institutions are created and modified by explicit agreement of states
themselves.
While this explicit and very straightforward impact of states on institutions has been
the focus of the rationalist approach to international institutions, recent research has also
pointed to less clearly visible and possibly even unintentional effects of state policies on
institutions. Changes in state practice may tacitly contribute to modification in international
institutions. These may be hard to detect and develop over long periods of time. Changes in
state practice have, for example, led to a considerable change in the meaning of sovereignty
over the past decades (and centuries). These changes have not necessarily been explicitly
codified. Nor are they necessarily the result of intentional institutional design. Rather the
collusion of marginal changes in individual foreign policies of different actors led over time
to changed practices, changed conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate behavior and
thus ultimately to institutional change. There are also less fundamental and less long-term
changes that work along the same lines. Take as an example the change of the G-7
institutions over the years. The occasional inclusion of Russia in G-7 meetings after the end
of the Cold War led over time to a formalized change in the institutions to make Russia a
permanent member of the meetings and transform the G-7 into the G-8. There have also been
less obvious changes, e.g. the transformation of the agenda of G-7 meetings from purely
economic issues to the broad agendas of today covering more general issues of political
cooperation. It would be inadequate to reconstruct such institutional changes as outcomes of
explicit negotiations and agreements. Rather they were brought about by gradually changing
practices over the years.
Such changes require actors to deviate to a certain degree from the institutional
norms and rules. However, even mere adherence to the institutions will tend to feed back on

18
them. Different strands of critical theorizing have highlighted the importance of the social
reproduction of institutions. This reproduction can be construed as one particular kind of
feedback loop in which states are predisposed by existing institutions to follow a certain path
of action; and by actually following that path contribute to the continuing existence of this
institution.
When taking together what we have said about the interrelation of institutions and
foreign policies, we arrive at a first basic picture of how feedback effects in foreign policy can
work. International institutions predispose actors towards certain courses of action by
constituting goals or constraining actions. Foreign policies, in turn, contribute to the
reproduction or change of the institutions by adhering to institutional rules, deviating from
them or renegotiating them.
There and back again II: The international distribution of power and foreign policy
That foreign policies may be affected by the international distribution of power is probably
one of the oldest assumptions of international political thought. It is easy to see the basic
intuition: What you do is fundamentally related to what you are able to do; and what states
can do in the international system is intimately linked to their power relative to other states.
Power is understood here as the control over certain resources that may allow a state to
achieve its goal in the international system, including military capabilities but also economic
resources.
The idea that a state's power influences its foreign policy has been spelled out time
and again in realist writing. More often than not this link is assumed to be quite direct. In
this view, the strive for power is taken to lie at the very heart of international relations. States
use power as a means and pursue power as an end (e.g. Morgenthau 1948). Consequently
states will be inclined to seek power and they be will forced to bow to the power and
influence of superior states. Great powers and small states will therefore display different,
characteristic kinds of foreign policy.
Structural realists have argued that the link between power and policy may not be
quite so straightforward (e.g. Waltz 1979). From their point of view, power is not an end by
and for itself in states' foreign policies. Rather, they regard the international distribution of
power as an opportunity structure which enables states to pursue certain actions and
constrains them from pursuing others. States may respond rationally to this opportunity
structure, in which case their foreign policies will display a certain inclination to seek power,

19
or autonomy, or influence in the international system. States, however, are not forced to use
the opportunities the international structure offers them. They may choose to ignore them or
their response to them may become distorted by domestic factors. They will then have to live
with the consequences of their acting so, which may entail costly adjustments for them in the
future. Neo-classical realists have attempted to elaborate this link further and to trace how
the interplay of the international distribution of power and domestic variables brings about
states' foreign policies (Wohlforth 1993, Zakaria 1998, Rose 1998).
While the exact link between power and policy may thus be quite complex it is
certainly plausible to assume that the distribution of power enables states to pursue certain
actions and constrains them from pursuing others; and that by virtue of this constraining and
enabling function it also provides incentives for states to pursue the accumulation of power.
This directly implies that states' policies themselves will have repercussions on the
international distribution of power, producing some quite direct feedback effects. By seeking
power, states are prone to actually change the international distribution of power. The
mechanism has an interesting twist to it. Whereas institutions appear to induce states to
contribute to the reproduction of the existing order, the international distribution of power
may entail incentives to modify it. From this point of view, it pays off to be stronger than
other states in the system. While states thus are induced to contribute to a reallocation of
resources in the system in their favor, the actual effect of their policies will depend on
individual circumstances. If, at the extreme, we are in a system with a roughly equal
distribution of power and all states attempt to achieve a reallocation in their favor, the effects
will likely cancel each other out and the distribution of power will roughly remain even. If
the system is unbalanced, the dynamics may be different in both the short and the long run.
In the short run, a dominant state may be better able to achieve its goals and assert its
interests. This may, however, induce weaker states in the system to intensify their efforts to
bolster their position in the international distribution of power. Their success, again, will
depend on the historical circumstances, yet their efforts may actually lead to a more even
distribution of power, e.g. if the original move of the dominant state made it easier for the
weaker states to move closer together.
These dynamics once again highlight both the importance of paying attention to
feedbacks between context and foreign policy to understand long-term dynamics in foreign
policies; and secondly the specific features of such feedback effects. How they actually play
out is contingent on historical circumstances and the characteristics of the states involved.
They may reinforce the existing distribution of power or undermine it—intentionally or
unintentionally. Realists would point out that especially when a strong state seeks to bolster

its dominant position in the international system the potential for unintentional negative
feedbacks is particularly high (e.g. Layne 1993, Waltz 1994).
20
There and back again III: Policies of others and foreign policy
While the preceding sub-sections have looked at how the broad structural environment of a
state may interact with this state's foreign policy, we will now turn to an aspect of the
international environment that is of a less general nature. Policies of other states obviously
affect what a state can and will do in the international system, but they do not necessarily
form macro-structures like the international distribution of power or international
institutions. Nonetheless they have been subject to some theoretical attention and reviewing
this research will help us understand how the policies of other states may become involved
in a process of foreign policy feedbacks.
There are, in particular, two strands of research that are of importance here. The most
elaborate rationalist account of the effects of other states' policies comes from game theory
(Kahler 1998); while interactionist approaches present us with a constructivist reading of
these effects (Wendt 1992). To begin with, game theory points out that the preferences and
policies of interaction partners form certain micro-structures (situations) which affect the
policy paths that are chosen by the actors. The most popular example, of course, is the
Prisoners' Dilemma in which the constellation of preferences leads both interaction partners
to choose policies which create a suboptimal interaction result for both of them. If the games
are repeated changes in one actor's policies affect the calculation and ultimately the policies
of the other actor. This is most obvious when the actors play tit-for-tat (Axelrod 1984), in
which both cooperative and uncooperative moves are answered by like moves from the
interaction partner. Tit-for-tat can then evolve into an instance of an (intentional) positive
feedback loop in which cooperation is reproduced and reinforced over time.
Game theory thus conceives of others' policies primarily as constraints on one's own
choices. They do not alter actors' preferences over ultimate outcomes but influence the
policies they choose to achieve these outcomes. This conforms with the basic thrust of many
empirically-minded foreign policy analyses, which represent foreign policies as responses to
the actions of others without further reflection on theory, e.g. negotiations between the U.S.
and North Korea, which may be recounted simply as a chain of actions and reactions by the
two parties.

21
Interactionist approaches, which are mostly inspired by the sociological approach of
symbolic interactionism (Mead 1962, Blumer 1969), have a somewhat different take on the
issue. They highlight not so much the constraining effect that others' policies might have on
the ability of actors to achieve their given goals. Rather they point out that (social) actors and
their goals only come into being in the interaction with others. According to them there is a
constitutive aspect to interactions and this implies that the policies of others contribute to
this constitutive process. It is especially the interpretation of each others' actions that creates
a mutual understanding of whether actors belong to the same group (Risse-Kappen 1995).
This process also has a regulative dimension because it helps to establish what is appropriate
in any given group and situation and what is not.
Both approaches, game theory and interactionism, inherently posit the existence of
feedback effects. If B's policies influence those of A, then A's policies will of course also affect
B's. The recursive dynamic that can result has already been illustrated above with the tit-fortat
game which can result either in self-reinforcing positive or negative feedbacks. If one
refrains from an overly strong reliance on substantive rationality, one can see the contingent
character of feedback effects even in this case: Actors have strong incentives to stick to the titfor-tat
strategy, yet they are not compelled to do so. Actors may drop out of the game and
respond to a cooperative move by non-cooperation. Although this is unlikely (it will be
costly for them in the long run), it is not impossible and whether they do it will be contingent
on the concrete circumstances. In the interactionist interpretation contingency even becomes
a central focus. It is usually pointed out that the movement from the first interaction to
established patterns of interaction has a high degree of openness (Wendt 1992). Once
established, however, the feedbacks tend to reinforce the established path and make it
difficult to deviate from it. Over time, institutions may develop, which come with their own
feedback loops as we have seen above.

Potential feedback effects
general
(positive/negative) intentional
Unintentional
institutions reproduction /
decay
power
policies
stabilization /
erosion
reinforcement /
modification
self-binding by institutional
design or discarding ties by
contribution to institutional
decay
increasing leverage by
accumulating power and
wealth
gaining support for own
policies
22
self-binding by
institutional evolution
discarding of ties to oneself
(and others) by
contribution to institutional
decay
increasing or decreasing
own leverage through the
distributional
consequences of own
policies
accidentally gaining
support or provoking
opposition through
consequences of own
policies
5 Closing the loop: How to analyze foreign policy on the agency-level?
What has been presented so far is a view of feedback effects which systematically excludes
the analysis of agency. Using the tools of structural IR theory we can discover certain typical
feedback dynamics. Whether they occur in any actual case, however, crucially depends on
how the actors involved deal with the structural dynamics. In this section we will therefore
open the toolbox of agency-oriented theory and survey the concepts it offers to analytically
deal with the role that actors have in closing the feedback loops in international relations.
FPA is certainly the most obvious context in which tools for an agency-based analysis
have been developed. However, we will in this section also look into agency-based
approaches that have developed in sociological and constructivist research which has only
loose connections to FPA. We divide our inventory in two parts. On this basis we can then
examine how the tools of agency-based approaches could be combined with those of
structuralist accounts in analyzing feedback effects.
In the first part we look at rationalist accounts of agency in foreign policies.
Rationalist accounts focus primarily on the domestic and personal constraints which
rationally calculating agents face. This line of argument is pursued by the bulk of FPA
research. This starts with the classic works in FPA, including the research on foreign policy
decision-making (Snyder/Bruck/Sapin 1962), on bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971), on
groupthink (Janis 1982), and on individual cognitive-psychological restrictions (George 1969)

23
and is developed further by the current research in this field. We shall see that in these
analyses the creative aspect of agency is either exogenous (i.e. simply assumed) or "in the
error term" (i.e. treated as a residual category that subsumes everything which has not been
explained by the external restrictions). It is only the literature on learning that enables
researchers to more systematically address agency in this perspective.
The second part of our inventory is constituted by the more sociologically-minded
and constructivist literature which is linked to different strands in FPA (Houghton 2007), IR
(Adler 2008), and policy analysis (Fischer 2003). Instead of assuming rationalist actors who
behave instrumentally in pursuit of material self-interest, these researchers stress more than
other approaches the sociological conception of agency and emphasize the intersubjective
and negotiated dimension of formulating foreign policy. Here we will also find many
approaches which focus on how agency is embedded in and constrained by certain types of
intersubjective structures (shared ideas, norms, practices, discoursive constructions). They
have their common ground primarily in their focus on the processes of social construction,
the impact of ideational factors, and the production of meaning by collectives in
intersubjective negotiations. There is, however, also a small group of approaches that is not
so much interested in these aspects of the social embeddedness of agency, but instead
focuses directly on the creative and contingent aspect of agency itself.
Rationalist FPA: classic works and current approaches
Searching for ways in which agency in foreign policy has been analyzed it is almost ironic to
see that by far the largest part of FPA has been devoted to analyzing the restrictions which
agents face in foreign-policy making systems. The seminal works of FPA proposed to take
both aspects into account when analyzing foreign policy, i.e. to study the particularities of
human agents making foreign policy decisions in a wider decision-making context
(Snyder/Bruck/Sapin 1962; Sprout/Sprout 1957). Both the Sprouts (1957) and Snyder and
his colleagues (1962) outlined a research agenda that would examine decision-makers
operating in their social context with all its factors (culture, history, geography, economics,
political institutions, ideology). From there, different strands of research developed (for an
overview of different "generations" of FPA see Gerner 1991, Hudson/Vore 1995, Hudson
2008). The common denominator of the large majority of FPA texts certainly was the
assumption that at the heart of foreign policy there were rational decision-makers which
faced a variety of restrictions at different levels. It were these restrictions that became the
major focus of research. Research tended to locate particular restrictions at a distinct level

24
and then zero in on this particular level. These levels ranged from overall societal features
(culture, public opinion) to the decision-making system at large and further down to small
group dynamics and individual characteristics. Since we are interested particularly in
analyzing the contribution of agency to feedback loops our main focus here is on approaches
which can shed light on this issue.
Research dealing with the domestic restrictions on rational decision-making at large
is certainly not useless in an account of feedback processes. FPA and policy research have
demonstrated especially how domestic institutions and group structures can limit the impact
of individual agency. Political institutions can leave a deep imprint on action. They tend to
contribute to the continuation of existing policies and thus generate path dependence (North
1990, Pierson 2004). Moreover, via institutional mechanisms, organizations tend to lead a life
of their own. Organizations and bureaucracies put their own survival at the top of their
priorities and seek to increase their turf against competitors. And small-scale group
structures may also strongly affect what individuals can do, e.g. by a tendency, in certain
settings, to systematically exclude dissenting voices (Janis 1982).
Nonetheless, embedded within all these structures and restrictions sits the individual.
A considerably large group of texts have turned their attention to these individuals and
examined how they can contribute to foreign policy decisions. Within this set of texts there
is, once again, a strong emphasis on the restrictions individuals face, not by virtue of their
being embedded in a restrictive environment, but due to inherent individual characteristics.
In his remarkable study of perception and misperception in international politics, Robert
Jervis (1976) set out to establish some general perceptual limitations with which human
beings are confronted and which thus also hamper the rational processing of information in
foreign policy decision making. This approach has been followed up by attempts to develop
more complete models of how foreign policy decision-makers process information and
arrive at decisions (Vertzberger 1990; for an overview: Sylvan/Voss 1998). Inspired by
political psychology and cognitive studies, there have been various attempts to examine not
only general patterns of human information processing, but to decode the cognition and
information processing of particular individuals by examining “operational codes” (George
1969), “cognitive maps” (Axelrod 1976) or leader’s personal characteristics in distinct foreign
policy orientations (Hermann 1970). This has generated a lively research tradition which
turned to examining cognitive and psychological features of different people and groups,
e.g. the Bush administration (Shannon/Keller 2007) or earlier U.S. presidents
(Walker/Schafer 2007).

25
While all these approaches are very good in identifying restrictions on the choices
that strategic actors can make they are not easily combined to close the feedback loop and
help us understand how impulses from the international context of a state may set off
processes across the different levels within the state and result in policy decisions that lead to
effects back in the international system. We consider research on learning the most
promising starting point to help researchers address these complexities and to formulate
accounts of feedbacks which can then be complemented by other approaches from FPA.
What makes the literature on learning so attractive is that it systematically takes into account
the external stimulus that leads to a certain reaction; that it focuses on how agents engage
with this stimulus in a more or less creative way; and that it (usually) conceptualizes
learning as a non-determinate, open-ended process.
At a conceptual level Karl W. Deutsch (1969: 145-153) has made an important
contribution to clarifying the notion of learning. He described political learning processes as
feedback processes, in which political systems react on external information/data. Deutsch's
systemic perspective focuses on the implications of learning for the system's goal
achievement. Accordingly he distinguishes two types of learning. "Simple learning” leads to
a change in means but not in ends because of new information, and in “complex learning” a
recognition of conflicts among values leads to a modification of both goals and means. This
analytical distinction has found wide application in IR (Wendt 1999: 326-336), FPA (Levy
1994: 286) and policy analysis (Hall 1993).
Regarding the question how learning happens in policy-making settings, rationalist
theorizing has primarily focused on issues of simple learning, i.e. on the strategic adaptation
to new circumstances. Some studies look first and foremost at the organizational level and
examine how organizations at large adapt their policies. The most widely received approach
in this context certainly is the organizational model of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
(1978). They try to grasp when and how an organization’s “theory in use” (the organizational
knowledge basis) in problematic situations can change.
There are other accounts, however, which take the individual as a starting point and
these approaches may be best able to serve as points of reference to incorporate agency in
rationalist accounts of feedback loops. A variety of studies, for instance, try to come to terms
with how decision-makers draw historical analogies and thus draw their 'lessons from
history' – an overall non-determinate process. Yuen Foong Khong (1992), for example,
demonstrates how the use of conflicting analogies (Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu) to
frame the problem of Vietnam led to conceptual difficulties in reasoning about policy options
(for other accounts of historical analogies in foreign policy formulation, see Neustadt/May

26
1988). Other approaches focus more generally on how individual belief-systems change in
response to challenges stemming from the individual's environment (Levy 1994; Tetlock
1991; Goldstein/Keohane 1993).
Scholars have applied learning models to explain the revolutionary changes under
the Soviet regime of Mikhail Gorbachev (Breslauer/Tetlock 1991; Stein 1994). Gorbachev’s
“new thinking” often serves as an exemplary case to demonstrate an “individual learning”
process which led to organizational learning and wide-ranging political effects. These
approaches then conceive of organizational learning as a bottom-up process which proceeds
from the individual to the organizational to the governmental level, a process which can be
blocked at any point of the cycle. According to Levy (1994: 288) “organizational learning
involves a multistage process in which environmental feedback leads to individual learning,
which leads to individual action to change organizational procedures, which leads to a
change in organizational behavior, which leads to further feedback.” Thus, as Thomas Risse-
Kappen (1994) demonstrated in the Soviet case of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, a change of mind
alone does not suffice to challenge established organizational and governmental routines.
Instead, to institutionalize that “New Thinking” in political contexts Gorbachev was
dependent on Soviet think tanks and advisories which channeled these ideas in political
structures.
However, most of these accounts stay, by and large, faithful to the basic assumptions
of rationalism. Accordingly learning rarely if ever involves a change or modification of
agents' underlying goals, i.e. rarely proceeds to the stage of reflexive or "complex learning" in
Deutsch's terms. Nonetheless they allow at least for the incorporation of a modicum of
agency in rationalist theorizing about foreign policy formulation because they acknowledge
that learning processes, although faced with immense structural obstacles, can occur and are
relatively open-ended. Learning decision-makers can break up the mechanistic feedback
loops suggested by structuralist IR theorizing. They can observe the effects of foreign policies
in the international system; analyze their effects on the achievement of basic foreign policy
goals; and strategically adapt foreign policy decisions in the light of these feedback effects,
thus either strategically utilizing feedback effects to further their goals or deliberately
attempt to break up positive or negative feedback loops that appear detrimental to goal
achievement. A full analysis of feedback loops along these lines would thus have to pay
attention not only to the structural impulses and effects that may bring about feedback loops;
but also to how decision-makers, embedded in a variety of constraining contexts, may learn
from experience and history and attempt to manipulate the emerging feedback loops. To do
so, researchers can rely on a multitude of analytic tools giving them access to learning

processes and the effects of restricting features of society, decision-making processes and
individual characteristics as we have tried to demonstrate in this section.
27
The constructivist point of view: the collective embeddedness of creative agency
In contrast to rationalist theorists who focus on the constraining effects for agency,
constructivists understand agency quite differently. Generally speaking, constructivists are
more optimistic than rationalists that agency can unfold its creative potential in domestic
settings. Of course, decision-makers are inevitably embedded in distinct institutional
settings; they are permanently constrained to respond to structural incentives. While
rationalists primarily concentrate on the material constraints, constructivists stress the
constraining effects of cultural contexts, norms, and discursive structures. Yet, actors are not
always prisoners of institutional rules; rather they have a creative capacity to act in
innovative ways and to change the rules and norms, or more generally, the structural
environment that constrains them. However, from such a sociologically-minded position it is
important to note that agents rarely act completely alone. They negotiate their interpretations
of the world in an intersubjective process and create meaning – “the social” – collectively
through practices and discourses.
Of course, this juxtaposition of constructivism and rationalism is a stark
simplification (see Ruggie 1998 for an overview). Nevertheless we see many similar attempts
in the different fields of political science to incorporate these constructivist insights in current
research in a way which is more than helpful for our question: How wide is the scope of
agency for decision makers in dealing with feedback effects in domestic contexts? In what
follows we will first deal with current approaches which stress the intersubjective dimension
and the sociological understanding of agency, and second we shed light on the creative
conception of agency in recent theorizing.
The constraining environment of foreign policy decision making is an integral part of
FPA literature which analyzes the distinct settings in which decision makers operate:
advisory systems, institutional settings, lobby groups and parliamentary structures
(Congress). However, the classic approaches of FPA focus less on the dynamic social
processes and the intersubjective character of these negotiations, but rather try to measure
the influence of constraining factors such as a lobby groups or the public opinion. Foreign
policy analyses such as the groupthink study of Janis (1982) and the bureaucratic politics
approach of Allison barely touch on a constructivist understanding that foreign policy
makers interact in social processes and that thus decisions are the product of collective and

28
argumentative negotiations. Only few studies in FPA have hitherto discovered the
interactive dimension of human agents from a constructivist point of view. In the traditional
line of Janis’s work, for instance, there are a few authors who attempt to think Beyond
Groupthink (‘t Hart/Stern/Sundelius 1997) and develop the classic account of Janis in new
methodological directions. A recent edited volume of Donald Sylvan and James Voss (1998)
bundles the current FPA literature on cognitive framing and problem representation. These
authors deal in different kind of methods with the relationship how group environments
affect individual cognition. Although Houghton (2007) recently suggested that there is no
hindrance to combine cognitive psychological approaches of FPA in the tradition of
Snyder/Bruck/Sapin (1962) and de Rivera (1968) with contemporary constructivist
theorizing in IR, it has to be remarked that such a theoretical opening is still in its infancy.
Interpretive policy analysis seems to have proceeded already one step further down
this road. This strand of policy research (Hajer/Wagenaar 2003 for an overview) suggests
that governmental politics should be understood in a less state-centered fashion and rather
as a complex relationship between state and society. Such approaches could be a theoretical
starting point for a sociologically informed foreign policy analysis as well. Pioneers in
deliberative policy analysis as Deborah Stone (1988), Martin Rein and Donald Schön (1994)
illuminated in their analyses why many policy controversies have often an intractable and
stubborn character. Problem solving in such controversies requires a much better
understanding of how various parties framed the situation. They demonstrate that policy
stalemates can be solved when “reframing” of the highly charged issues succeeded. This
underlines the possibilities of collective learning and conflict resolution. Other authors such
as Dvora Yanow (1996) and Maarten Hajer (1995) more directly follow the proposed
“argumentative turn” (Fischer/Forrester 1993) and elaborate the importance of attending to
the discursive dimension of public policy and politics. Hence, analyzing discourse politics is
understood in terms of struggles over the interpretation of issues rather than over
substantive questions. The crucial question then is whose interpretation becomes
authoritative and why this is so (Fischer 2003: 80). For instance, Hajer (1995) has analyzed the
politics of the acid rain controversy to show how different applications and understandings
of acid rain have generated very different types of politics in two countries. Such a socialinteractive
approach is thus conceptualized as an exchange of arguments, of competing,
sometimes contradictory, suggestions of how one is to make sense of reality. For researchers
this means exploring discourse practices through which social actors seek to persuade others
to see a particular situation, event or problem. In contrast to rationalist models such as the
advocacy-coalition approach (Sabatier/Jenkins-Smith 1991) in which social actors have fixed

29
roles and clear calculations of interests, discourse accounts view politics as an argumentative
struggle in which social actors are actively engaged in choosing and adapting thoughts,
shaping them in an ongoing struggle for argumentative triumph over rival positions (Fischer
2003: 83-85).
To sum up, the accounts of interpretive policy analysis stress the constraining effects
of discursive constructions in policy controversies for decision makers. Yet from a
deliberative point of view these discursive structures in domestic settings not only constrain
the social actors, rather they enable them to persuade other actors of their own position.
Thus, agency is not missing. Rather it is embedded and discursively constrained.
Similar debates can be found in IR research although they are yet completely
unconnected to those in policy analysis. One important debate emerged from the question
how actors attempt to make their position win in negotiations—by bargaining for an optimal
solution (rationalism) or by arguing to convince others (constructivism) (see Risse 2000 for an
overview). This debate certainly has been artificial to some degree in its clear-cut split
between the two ideal-type strategies which makes no sense in empirical studies
(Deitelhoff/Müller 2005). Nonetheless it proved fruitful in bringing about other, more
refined approaches which also focus on argumentative struggles and discursive mechanisms,
similar to the accounts in interpretive policy analysis. Nicole Deitelhoff (2008), for instance,
combines in her discourse theory of international governance (following Habermas)
elements of discourse approaches with actor-oriented models by reconstructing the
negotiations on the International Criminal Court. While the potential of agency in this
approach is constrained by powerful communication structures, agency permanently shines
through the discourse as “isles of persuasion” which break up established structures. Other
constructivist accounts (Klotz 1995; Risse/Finnemore/Sikkink 1998) dealing with the impact
of norms (human rights) on domestic politics put more emphasis on structures and their
constraining effects and pay only scant attention to the agency-level. The same can be said
for most of recent discourse approaches in IR, in which agency is getting completely lost,
especially in poststructuralist discourse analysis (Hansen 2006).
To bring agency back in to the study of discourses is the suggestion of Iver Neumann
(2002) who introduced a new theoretical program in IR by studying the role of practices in
international politics. Current practice approaches in IR (Büger/Gadinger 2007; Pouliot 2008)
stress the constraining and enabling function of practices as an intermediating element
between agency and structures. As an exemplary case, Emanuel Adler (2008), a leading
protagonist of this debate, explains the spread of security communities (NATO) by referring
to the concept of “communities of practice”. For Adler collective meanings (peaceful change)

30
cognitively evolve between individuals’ expectations and dispositions and the
institutionalization in practices. By assuming like-minded groups of practitioners who are
bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice, Adler underlines
the dynamic relationship in processes of collective learning.
While in practice approaches the role of agency does not receive much attention
another theoretical program has developed in IR theory which puts the creative potential of
agency in the centre of analysis. This focus on agency is closely linked to the re-discovering
of pragmatism (see the Special Issue on Pragmatism in Millennium 2002). More than
discourse and practice theorists pragmatists emphasize the enabling character of agency:
agents are able to act reflexively and quite different from established rules, first of all in
conflict situations. Yet, most of these contributions which argue for a more-agency-oriented
perspective (Kratochwil 2007, Bohman 2002), stay on a pure theoretical level. The attempts to
grasp agency also in empirical terms are quite rare: beside the FPA account of Hellmann et
al. (2005, 2006) already reviewed above, there emerge first attempts to incorporate the
insights of French neo-pragmatism (Boltanksi/Thévenot 2006) to IR studies (Balli 2007). The
seminal work of Boltanski/Thévenot which is widely discussed in sociological debates is an
unused starting point to transfer agency-oriented studying in IR in a pragmatist fashion. 3
In sum, it seems that the constructivist literature in FPA, IR, and policy analysis
which deals with the constraining elements for agency and the enabling potential of agency
offers some fruitful starting points for our general heuristic to conceptualize the agencylevel.
From a constructivist point of view decision makers cannot act alone, rather they
negotiate and interact in collective groups and are embedded in discursive contexts. The
repertoire of FPA offers a broad spectrum of perspectives on foreign policy decision making,
yet the intersubjective dimension is still under-theorized, and rarely linked to recent
constructivist debates. In recent debates in IR and policy analysis we find more developed
accounts, referring to discourse and practice theory, which conceptualize the dynamic
relationship between agency and structures with different accents. While discourse
approaches in IR emphasize the constraining effects of discursive structures on agency,
especially the (in IR and FPA) rarely noted accounts in policy analysis consider elements of
agency in their conceptualization of public politics as an argumentative struggle. Recent
3 Boltanski/Thévenot put the individual in the focus of analysis. Following them, individuals are
permanently constrained in conflict situations to justify their actions to others which can lead to
disagreements when individuals instinctively draw on different principles. They identify six
principles, or orders of worth, on which individuals fall back in their justifications: civic (Rousseau),
market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame
(Hobbes).

31
practice approaches in IR take into account agency to some degree as well and illustrate the
embeddedness of agency around practices in institutional settings. Regarding pure agency as
the focus of analysis is the merit of pragmatist accounts in IR which still have to demonstrate
the potential for empirical work, though.
If we take together the structuralist and agency-centered perspectives we arrive at a
more comprehensive view of how feedback process in foreign policy may evolve. Figure 3
combines the different building blocks for a heuristic framework to analyze these feedback
processes.
Figure 3: Feedback processes in foreign policy
6 Conclusion
In this paper we argued that the analysis of feedback loops in foreign policy requires
overcoming the split between structuralist IR theory and agency-centered FPA. We
examined the building blocks for a heuristic by reviewing different strands of IR and FPA
research which should help to guide empirical research towards a more process-oriented
foreign policy analysis. Tracing feedback loops in foreign policy requires looking at both the
level of international context and the level of agency. The prime task for the researcher is to
arrive at a holistic picture of foreign policy by avoiding the search for a determinist

32
explanation factors. The starting point of research does not matter: you can begin with the
agency-level and then reconstruct the effects of foreign policy on the international context
and back again, or go the other way and start with the effects from the international
environment on state decisions.
Such a perspective may also serve to heed the disciplinary calls for analyzing the
“unloved” empirical phenomenon of foreign policy change in long-term dynamics. The
heuristic firstly serves as an analytical guidance to sensitize the researcher to the possible
constraining elements on the international level and on the level of decision making.
Secondly, through our review of different theoretical research strands in IR, FPA and policy
analysis, researchers are invited to use the potentially fruitful accounts we identified. Of
course, such a theoretical repertoire is potentially open-ended. The recent range of
theoretical approaches can be divided, roughly spoken, in rationalist-institutionalist and
constructivist-sociological accounts on both level of analysis. Thus, depending on the
theoretical affinity of the researcher, the reconstruction of a feedback loop has either a more
rationalist or a more constructivist bend. There exist many potential empirical cases for
such an analysis: the constraining effects of the WTO on developing countries, the complex
relationship between Turkey and the European Union, the impact of US Latin America
policy on the rise of populist regimes there etc.
Our own goal with the heuristic, which itself is still work in progress, is to study U.S.
foreign policy after 9-11. Applying the heuristic, we intend to elaborate the feedback loop in
three major steps: first, we start with the decision of the Bush administration to begin a
“global war against terrorism” after 9-11, beginning in Afghanistan. We would take a closer
look on this period of time to grasp possible domestic constraints during the
implementation process which caused internal (establishing Homeland Security politics) as
well as external (new alliance building: coalition of the willing) effects. The second research
step focuses on the new formation of the international environment over the years of the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, the changes within the three dimensions of the
international environment are at the centre of analysis: 1) in the institutional context there
are changes and disagreements in the transatlantic relationship in material questions
(alliances) as well as normative dimensions (legitimacy of U.S. hegemony); 2) the
distribution of power and wealth points us the relative power position of the U.S. in the
international system which is either characterized as a new empire, or as a declining
hegemony with overstretching ambitions (Iraq) which declines in power position relative to
rising rivals as China; and 3) a look at the policies of other actors (states) highlights the
changing bilateral relations between the U.S. with old allies (Britain, Germany), ambivalent

33
partners (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), and enemies (Al Qaida, Iran). The second Bush
administration had to struggle with the changes in this environment, to which US policy
had crucially contributed. US policy had both to adjust its policy to a shrinking room of
action (strategic learning) and at the same time rethink its basic foreign policy goals which
had been a key contributing factor to the problematic new situation (reflexive learning).
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