Feedback Effects in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis

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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
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Page 3 and 4: idges the fields of IR and FPA; and
Page 5 and 6: 5 Bridging the gap: between abstrac
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Page 9 and 10: 9 3 Feedback effects: some general
Page 11 and 12: 11 These considerations suggest tha
Page 13 and 14: 13 Figure 2: Foreign policy and thr
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Page 19 and 20: 19 or autonomy, or influence in the
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Page 27 and 28: processes and the effects of restri
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Page 33 and 34: 33 partners (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia
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Feedback Effects in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis

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