International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   Beliefs play a pivotal role in explaining the process of foreign policy decision making, the ensuing process of strategic interaction between actors engendered by their decisions, and the political outcomes resulting from this interaction process. Beliefs reflect mirroring effects in diagnosing the decision making situation, exercise steering effects in responding to this definition of the situation, and display the learning effects of feedback as the definition of the decision making situation evolves over time or across different contexts. Operational code analysis models these effects, but “operational code theory” is a misnomer – the phrase more accurately describes an alliance of attribution and schema theories from psychology and game theory from economics applied to the domain of politics. This “theory complex” specifies belief-based solutions to the puzzles posed by diagnostic, decision making, and learning processes in world politics ( Walker 2002; 2003 ). The major social and intellectual dimensions of operational code theory first appeared in the seminal research on the Bolshevik operational code by Nathan Leites (1951; 1953) . The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the immediate social dimensions for his investigations. The Rand Corporation, a United States Air Force think tank, was the setting in which Leites ... log in or subscribe to read full text