10 - Individual preferences, national choices, and international systems

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The theory of international processes connects individual preferences, choices, and actions to international politics. It consists of four layers. The first layer explains how individuals form preferences over policy options. The second layer links individual preferences to national choices via collective decision making. The third layer connects the ways nations make choices and the outcomes they get in an interdependent international setting. The fourth layer describes aspects of the evolution of international processes over time.

From the definition of international processes as a chain of temporally related and spatially interdependent intersections of national decisions, it is obvious that the theoretical framework developed herein is of the “bottom-up” type. That is to say, it is a theory in which the whole – the international process – evolves as an aggregation of elements. The theory specifies a causal chain starting with individual traits and perceptions and ending with levels of long-term stability in international interactions. To be sure, the aggregation process is quite complex, for it involves several processes by which inputs are transformed into outputs at each level of analysis. The principal theme of this theory is that complex structures and processes in international politics do not have a life of their own which is independent of and – to a large extent – determines the behavior of the units.