(Page 9 of 33) - Reagan and Gorbachev: Altercasting at the End of the Cold War authored by Malici, Akan.

learning may or may not lead to any subsequent changes in actions. Other mechanisms may be at
play as well. These are a response to a shift in context (structural adjustment), or the stimulus of
another state’s behavior (social learning) (Levy, 1994). The chief difference between these
mechanisms is that experiential learning is a cognitive process whereas structural adjustment and
social learning are behavioral processes.

This distinction is important for the assessment of whether President Reagan’s foreign policy
behavior towards the Soviet Union is indeed legitimately ascribed to beliefs and experiential
learning as argued by constructivists (Wendt, 1992, 1999). Conceptualized within an operational
code framework, learning occurs if and when an actor’s beliefs about the nature of the political
universe and the most effective means to achieve political goals are strengthened, weakened, or
altered altogether. Operational code analysis also allows us to distinguish among three levels of
experiential learning: simple, diagnostic, and complex (Deutsch, 1963; Tetlock, 1991; Leng, 2000;
Levy, 1994; Nye, 1987; Walker et al., 2001). Simple learning is defined as changes in instrumental
beliefs about the best means to achieve goals, and diagnostic learning is defined as changes in
philosophical beliefs about the political universe. Complex learning occurs when an actor’s key
philosophical beliefs about political goals and key instrumental beliefs about the most effective
means to achieve them are modified so as to alter a leader’s strategic preferences.

The answer to the above research questions – Did Ronald Reagan merely adapt to Gorbachev’s
initiatives and play along, or did he go further? Did he go as far as to alter his definition of the
situation as an effect of learning? Did he change his very beliefs about what the Soviet Union
was about? – lies in identifying the learning that he experienced, and evaluating what he learned at
each level of learning. If Gorbachev’s strategy of altercasting was successful, then we should
expect that an operational code analysis of Reagan’s beliefs over time leads to affirmative answers
to these questions. Before engaging in an empirical analysis of this hypothesis, it is important to
devise a systematic research strategy.

METHODS AND DESIGN

What distinguishes this study from a conventional constructivist analysis of international
interactions is that it uses systematic research procedures to quantitatively demonstrate the
impact of ideational variables and learning patterns. In order to determine President Reagan’s
operational code, this study employs the Verbs in Context System (VICS). As a method of
content analysis, VICS draws inferences about a leader’s operational code beliefs from public
statements, such as speeches or interviews. The focus within each public statement is on verbs
because these are considered to be a speaker’s linguistic representation of perceived power
relationships. VICS provides values for six attributes for each recorded verb and its surrounding
context: subject, verb category, domain of politics, tense of the verb, intended target, and
context. These categories become the basis for calculating the operational code indices in Table
1 so that it is possible to compare VIVS scores between leaders or compare them for the same
leader over time (Walker, Schafer and Young, 2003). An automated content analysis program
called Profiler+ retrieves the verbs from each leader’s public statements, codes them with the aid
of an operational code dictionary, and then provides the data to index each element of the
decision maker’s operational code (Young 2001).