Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

Foreign Policy Decision-Making, edited by Richard Snyder, H. W. Bruck, and Burton Sapin 40 years ago, is one of the foundational works of the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) in the field of International Relations (IR). As is the case with any revolutionary vision, it has taken a great deal of time—in this case, over four decades—for those who followed the initial vision to find that their work is making its way toward the heart of current debates in the larger field of which they are a part. Today, the questions are asked in a slightly different dialect than that used by Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin (hereafter “SBS”), but most of the questions are the very same ones that stirred SBS so many years ago. Familiarity with current debates makes any close reading of Foreign Policy Decision-Making an interesting experience, given the uncanny prescience of their concerns about issues such as:the agent-structure problematiquecapturing cultural effects in international affairsthe relationship between rational choice and decision-making modelsthe problem of dynamism and change in IR theorythe “two-level game”; interrelating domestic and foreign influences on nation-state actionthe need for integration in theory-buildingbroader methodological issues concerning choice of unit of analysis, preferred modes of satisfactory explanation, and appropriate data collection.