Operational Code Analysis at a Distance: The Verbs in Context system of Content Analysis

Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin (1962) argued many years ago that those of us interested in understanding foreign policy decisions needed to get inside the “black box” of the decision-making process. Doing so, they pointed out, required a focus on the agents involved in the process. This agent-centered approach differed significantly from the broader, structural approaches that had marked the study of global politics prior to their revolutionary work. At an intuitive level it makes sense to focus on the process and the agents involved, and indeed, most of our casual conversations about international politics and foreign policy center around individuals and small decision-making groups. Many of the major subfields in international politics are nonetheless populated by structural or systems-level approaches, which either ignore individuals altogether or make simplified assumptions about agent-centered or micro-level processes that are under-theorized or not tested.