Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory

Abstract

The purpose of this research note is to suggest a potential general paradigm for the study of foreign policy processes. It is explicitly synthetic in that it combines Arnold Wolfers's notion of a continuum, the extremities of which he labels the pole of power and pole of indifference, with Theodore Lowi's efforts to affirm the nexus between issue and policy process. Two questions prove crucial in the determination of issue area: Is or is not the domestic impact of the issue symmetrical? And are the political goods at stake exclusively tangible or not? With the answers to these questions it becomes possible to specify the issue area (distribution, regulation, “interaction-protection,” redistribution) in which an event may be classified and to hypothesize the nature of the policy process (the identity of the major actors, the intensity of conflict) to be observed. Particular attention is paid to limited war as a redistributive issue area in order to make the case that redistribution, contrary to Lowi's view, is an important foreign policy process. Finally an effort is made to suggest how issue-based propositions could be utilized in the transnational comparison of foreign policy processes. It is suggested that differences in the policy process across issue areas within a given state may be as great as differences in process within a particular arena of power for two states as different in political system as the United States and the USSR.