Issue area and foreign policy analysis

The past decade has witnessed the investment of considerable energy and ingenuity in the refinement of the categories of foreign policy determinants proposed in James Rosenau's famous essay, “Pre-theories and Theories of Foreign Policy.” A sizable literature on foreign policy behavior is now developing, based upon empirical tests of the explanatory power of such variables as size, wealth, degree of political accountability, decision-maker attributes, environmental stimuli, etc. Surprisingly little attention in the field of comparative foreignpolicy, however, has been directed at specifying more precisely and in operational form the concept of issue area—an important component of Rosenau's “pre-theory” and an analytic concept that has received much attention in the public policy field. Moreover, among those scholars who do employ the concept there is little consensus as to the merits of a content based as opposed to a process oriented treatment of issue area or to the implications for empirical research of selecting one approach over the other. This essay seeks: 1) to review the foreign policy literature that attaches major importance to issue area; 2) to assess the merits of alternative treatments of the concept in terms of their contribution to the development of a theory of comparative foreign policy; and 3) to specify the conditions under which different issue area approaches can be used most profitably in comparative foreign policy research.