Feedback Effects in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis

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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