---
title: "Foreign-Policy Analysis: Levels and Three Models"
description: "Foreign-policy analysis uses Waltz's three images, the levels-of-analysis problem and Allison's three decision-making models to explain state choices for IR"
url: "https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/lessons/exam-ir-foreign-policy-analysis-levels-of-analysis-bureaucratic-politics"
---

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Foreign-policy analysis: levels of analysis & bureaucratic politics

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# Foreign-policy analysis: levels of analysis & bureaucratic politics

Foreign-policy analysis through Waltz's three images, the levels-of-analysis problem, and Allison's three models of decision-making, exam-tuned for IR papers.

## From systems to decision-makers

Foreign-policy analysis (FPA) asks not *what states want* but *why a particular state chose a particular act at a particular moment*. It opens the black box that realist systemic theory deliberately keeps shut. Its founding device is the **levels-of-analysis** problem, framed by Kenneth Waltz in *Man, the State, and War* (1959) as three **images** of the causes of war, and sharpened by J. David Singer in his 1961 *World Politics* article 'The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations'.

## Waltz's three images

- **First image (individual/human nature):** war originates in the psychology, ambition or misperception of leaders. Robert Jervis's *Perception and Misperception in International Politics* (1976) is the canonical first-image study; cognitive biases, analogies (the 'Munich' analogy of 1938) and emotion drive choice.
- **Second image (state/domestic):** the internal constitution of the state—regime type, ideology, public opinion, interest groups—explains behaviour. Democratic peace theory (Doyle, 1983) and the 'second-image reversed' (Gourevitch, 1978) live here.
- **Third image (international system):** anarchy and the distribution of capabilities compel behaviour regardless of who governs. This is the structural-realist level Waltz himself privileged in *Theory of International Politics* (1979).

Waltz's claim is that the first two images locate the *efficient* causes while the third supplies the *permissive* cause: anarchy allows war, but does not by itself explain any single war. Singer's contribution was methodological—warning that mixing levels produces incoherent explanation, and that the analyst must choose a level deliberately and stick to it.

## Why a fourth level matters

Later FPA added a **decision-making level** beneath the state: the bureaucracies, committees and standard operating procedures through which policy is actually produced. Richard Snyder, H.W. Bruck and Burton Sapin pioneered this in *Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics* (1954), insisting that 'the state' is a fiction and that only identifiable officials decide. This decision-making turn is what distinguishes FPA from grand IR theory: it treats the policy output as the product of human beings operating inside organisations under stress, deadline and incomplete information.

The practical payoff is diagnostic. Confronted with any case—India's 1998 Pokhran-II tests, the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, China's 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative—the analyst can ask: is this driven by a leader's worldview (first), by domestic coalitions and regime imperatives (second), by systemic pressure and the balance of power (third), or by organisational routine and bureaucratic bargaining (fourth)? A complete answer usually layers all four, but a disciplined answer names the dominant level and justifies the choice.

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