ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the linkage from the perspective of foreign policy elites and international politics. Numerous theoretical and methodological problems confront the analyst who attempts to conduct psychological investigations of foreign policy behavior. Operationalization emerges as an especially serious obstacle in psychodynamic analyses of foreign policy elites. The pragmatic or extra-scientific criteria one would employ to select an approach to the explanation of foreign policy outcomes would have to do with the kinds of constituencies one wished to serve and the ways one might wish to serve them. The nature of the situation also influences the impact of psychological characteristics of decision-makers. Routine decisions are analogous to very simple computer programming or information retrieval operations. A foreign policy-maker simply "searches" for and invokes the relevant precedent. The high stress and other features which characterize a crisis situation represent intervening variables which modify the relationship between actor attributes and foreign policy behavior.
