Philosophers of science have been skeptical that the social sciences can boast of any truly scientific progress. This skepticism is heightened, if anything, when speaking of political science and international relations. While international relations might be argued to have a set of more or less dominant approaches, an “approach” is not a research program in the Lakatosian sense (Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1980). There is no significant accumulation of empirical explanation by its normal scientists, and there is no revolutionary movement that promises to explain all that has been accounted for before. In fact, more has heretofore not been explainable.

Perhaps that is about to change. In other work, Amelia Hadfield and I have pointed to three efforts that aspire to move beyond the status quo in the direction of greater empirical content and greater exposure to sincere falsifiability (Valerie Hudson and Amelia Hadfield, “Neoclassical Realism and Behavioral IR as Recent Attempts to Bridge the IR-Structure/FPA-Agent Theoretical Divide: Walking Towards, or Past, the Other?”, paper presented at the annual conference of the International Studies Association, San Diego, California, 1–5 April 2012). The most organized of those three efforts is that of Stephen Walker, his former students, and their current students. The edited volume Rethinking Foreign Policy Analysis, which combines new material as well as previously published journal articles, is the definitive statement on the current status of this research program. It is well worth reading, even if one does not intend to join the Walker School, for it raises the bar for setting the objectives and organizing the activity of scholarship in international relations and foreign policy analysis (FPA).

The Walker School terms its efforts part of the neobehavioral movement in IR. The “neo” derives from the fact that the Walker School builds upon older manifestations of behaviorism: behavioral IR and behavioral FPA. They “employ both the concepts of rationality and power and the concepts of beliefs, emotions, and motivations” (p. 7). Noting that behavioral IR and behavioral FPA have been either cast as rivals or assumed to inhabit separate intellectual spheres entirely, the Walker School is determined to move beyond this stalemate. Their work can be characterized simultaneously as realist, rationalist, and cognitivist. Power politics, rational choice, and political psychology must be allied, argues Walker and his colleagues. As physicists have found, things look very different from a microscopic versus a macroscopic point of view; what has been necessary is the development of a mesoscopic theory that allows us to see the unity between what we see at the microscopic level and what we see at the macroscopic level in international affairs.

Walker uses the analogy of driving to illustrate what he means by mesoscopic theory. At the microscopic level, we may look at the specific movements of wheels and gears of the car; at the macroscopic level, we may recognize a type of behavior called “driving the car.” What allies the two views of reality is “driving to grandma's house,” which will help us understand why the wheels and gears are moving as they do while also retaining a conception of the activity as part of a broader type of event. This would be a quantum theory, if one will, of international affairs, and reduce the dissonance that we call the agent-structure problem: “If we are successful in explaining the exercise of power in world politics with a robust behavioral model based on richer and more rigorous conceptualizations and measurements of rationality and power, then we can claim to make scientific progress in the study of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis without adding more elements” (p. 17).

That is the encouraging and understandable overview of the Walker School's efforts. The nuts and bolts of how they build this mesoscopic theory is much more complex and may daunt all but the most determined reader. (For example, in just one table, Walker and his colleagues outline 144 sequential games, but note that there are more than 576 possible.) Indeed, one must learn an entire set of acronyms, the most important of which are TIP, TOM, CUE, and VICS, but which also include P1 (not to be confused with P-1), BACE (Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates), and many others. One downside of research programs is that they may begin to talk more to themselves than to others, and evidence of that syndrome is somewhat impenetrable jargon and a maze of acronyms. The Walker School does show signs that it is in danger of falling into this intellectual trap of insularity, and I hope that they work to overcome that disposition.

Here is the Walker School's theoretical framework, translated by your reviewer (in other words, I can only hope I got this straight): to link “the world in their [the leaders'] minds” with “the world of events,” we must first be able to analyze the belief systems of leaders. The Walker School does this through binary role theory, instantiated through assessment of a leader's operational code, operationalized through the Verbs in Context automated content-analysis coding system. More precisely, once they have used the VICS scheme to content-analyze a leader's speech texts for four particular elements of the operational code, specifically I-1, P-4a, P-1, and P-4b (which refer to various philosophical and instrumental belief continua about Self and Other), the authors are able to suggest the preference order each type of leader will have when he or she faces situations of dyadic international conflict. (Their framework is primarily applicable to dyadic relations, though they outline how the same framework could be applied to triads. Beyond triads, the complexity explodes exponentially.)

That is, the authors have a Theory of Inferences about Preferences (TIP). The six rules of TIP will determine, for each leader type, whether he or she prefers Settlement (DD), Deadlock (EE), Domination (ED), or Submission (DE) as an outcome to the conflict, and in what order these four outcomes would be preferred. In a conflictual dyad, Walker and his colleagues will determine the preference orderings of each side in the conflict on the basis of each leader's operational code.

At this point, we begin to move into “the world of events.” A dyad wherein each side possesses a known preference ordering on outcomes in essence creates a 2 × 2 game. The authors then turn to TOM, Steven Brams's Theory of Moves (1994), to suggest how each rational choice game, played in four moves, will turn out (by looking at the Nash or the nonmyopic equilibria). The two players may or may not be playing the same game, but the TOM allows for that possibility, and is still able to suggest what the subsequent moves in the game will be. (Indeed, using CUE, the Theory of Cues that the authors have developed, the players' learning during the game can also be gauged.) There are 78 structurally different 2 × 2 games, and this number increases if one looks at the intersections created when the two players are playing different games.

These predictions can be checked against a record of what actually happened in the conflict. That is, events data sets can be probed for these dyadic sequential games. How? The authors have developed a software system that “partitions an event series into a series of moves by each state toward the other with each actor's moves bounded by the intervening words and deeds of the other…. [W]e recode each move as either escalatory (E) or de-escalatory (D)” (p. 225). (All conflict events are coded as escalatory, and all cooperative events are coded as de-escalatory.) Thus, Walker School scholars are able to content-analyze leaders' speeches, posit how dyads involving those leaders will play their sequential games, and then check to see whether those projections match up with what actually occurred in the real world as captured by events data sets.

In addition to such sincere falsification—a refreshing commitment to find in IR scholarship—the Walker School is also able to ask and answer other interesting questions, which comprise the middle chapters of the volume. In Chapters 5 to 13, various historical cases are analyzed in this vein. For example, Akan Malici analyzes the subjective games that rogue leaders such as Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, Bashar al-Asad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are playing, and then, using TOM, recommends that the United States use certain moves to steer the dyadic conflict that it has with each leader's nation. Kai He and Huiyun Feng use TOM in a two-level game scenario to explain why Kim Jong-Il's pursuit of nuclear weapons was the only move that would bring him to a preferred equilibrium point in both the internal and the international games he was playing. Jonathan Renshon suggests that George W. Bush's operational code changed as much over the period wherein he moved from being a candidate to being president as it did over the period from before 9/11 to the period after. Walker and Mark Schafer demonstrate that knowledge of the subjective game a leader is playing produces more accurate predictions of behavior than the “objective game” posited by arealist balance of power and national-interest premises.

In short, the questions that the Walker School is able to raise and then answer using their theoretical framework are both interesting and important. (Whether the answers should be considered definitive depends on whether one accepts the operational details of the framework, of course. There are lots of potentially troublesome points there—for example, TOM will not work if you cannot rightly specify the initial state. How do you do that for years-long sequences of dyadic interaction between two states?)

In sum, Rethinking Foreign Policy Analysis deserves a place on the shelf of all empirically oriented IR and FPA scholars, especially those who have either despaired of, or been content with, the separation between those two fields of study. We are slowly but surely following in the footsteps of economics; thin accounts of rationality are being replaced by thicker accounts informed by psychology. The Walker School gives us a glimpse of what that future looks like in IR, showing both the promise and the pitfalls that lie ahead.