Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [165]
Levy attempted to empirically identify the six actors’ preferences for these four possible outcomes of the crisis, and to do so independently of the behavior he was trying to explain. He assumed that these preferences were stable over the course of the crisis (and found no evidence to the contrary). This enabled him to infer that any changes in behavior were due to changes in international and domestic constraints or changes in information available to decision-makers—not to changes in preference at different points in the diplomatic crisis. An analysis of available historical materials enabled Levy to identify the actors’ preferences as follows. (The symbol ″>″ means preferred to, and ″?″ indicates that a definitive preference could not be established.)
Figure A.2. Actors’ Preferences for Particular Outcomes.
Thus, all five European great powers and Serbia preferred a negotiated peace settlement (NP) to a world war (WW), yet they ended up in a world war. In this sense World War I may qualify as an “inadvertent war”—one that neither side expects or wants at the beginning of the crisis, but that occurs as a result of interactions and decisions as the crisis develops.
To examine how these countries’ interactions led to World War I, Levy employed a path dependency research design that identified critical decision points during the six-week diplomatic crisis. He emphasizes that political leaders were not confronted by a single decision whether or not to go to war, but instead faced a series of decisions at a succession of critical decision points as the crisis unfolded. Their preferences over final outcomes were relatively stable over time, Levy finds, “but their policy options, strategic constraints, available information, and policy dilemmas were often different at these successive decision points. Moreover, each decision altered the constraints that decision makers faced at the next critical juncture and further narrowed their freedom of maneuver.”635
Levy observed that the theoretical literature fails to recognize that not all international crises—even those that end up as “inadvertent” wars—are equally amenable to crisis management. “Some crises are structured in such a way—in terms of the preferences of the actors and the diplomatic, geographical, technological, and organizational constraints on their freedom of action—that they are likely to escalate to war in spite of the desires of statesmen to avoid it.”636 To avoid overstating the importance of crisis mismanagement in war outbreaks, such studies “must begin by specifying the underlying preferences of each of the actors and the structural constraints on their actions.”637 Even so, Levy notes, there were several critical points in this prolonged crisis “at which political leaders could have behaved differently without seriously threatening their vital interests.” However, the windows of opportunity for more effective crisis management were “not only narrow but were constantly changing, and at different times for each of the great powers.”638
JEFFREY W. KNOPF, DOMESTIC SOCIETY AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: THE IMPACT OF PROTEST ON U.S. ARMS CONTROL POLICY. CAMBREIDGE:CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITYPRESS,1998.
The research objective of this study is to show that citizen activism can be an important source of state preferences in foreign policy, especially on decisions to seek international cooperation. The subclass of this phenomenon singled out for empirical and theoretical analysis is the impact under certain conditions that peace movements in the United States have had on decisions to seek arms control with the Soviet Union.
The book contributes to international relations theory by significantly expanding our understanding of the impact that domestic society can have on foreign policy. Domestic society is generally treated as a source of incentives that lead policymakers