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A survey examined theory-driven versus data-driven assessments in a crisis. Respondents were 604 subscribers to International Security who completed a mailed questionnaire. The questionnaire contained alternative versions of a hypothetical crisis scenario and elicited assessments of threat, deterrence contingencies, and policy responses. An earlier section of the questionnaire surveyed general beliefs about Soviet-U.S. relations and military strategy, permitting examination of the relationships of respondents' general beliefs to their assessments. Alternative versions of the hypothetical crisis differed in information describing the crisis, permitting examination of the influence of specific data on assessments. Four kinds of information were varied: Soviet motives, the balance of interests, the local conventional military balance, and the nuclear balance. Respondents were substantially more theory-driven than data-driven in assessing the hypothetical crisis. Assessments were particularly associated with beliefs about Soviet motives and the necessity of displaying resolve to deter Soviet aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Study examined American elite views of relations with the Soviet Union, and investigated the relative effects of respondents' views and certain kinds of evidence on policy responses to a hypothetical crisis in the Persian Gulf. Four orthogonal factors were found to describe current elite views: (1) support for detente. (2) support for deterrence.(3) assumptions of rationality and accuracy, and (4) rejection of a cold war perspective. Four kinds of evidence were manipulated in a hypothetical crisis scenario: (a) Soviet intentions, (b) the local conventional military balance, (c) the nuclear balance, and (d) the degree of U.S. interest in the region. All belief factors and all four kinds of evidence were found to influence the policy responses in meaningful ways. However, for all policy items, the belief factors accounted for a greater proportion of the variance. These results provide qualified support for the idea that policy responses directed toward managing an adversary are significantly ‘theory driven.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that the success of Gorbachev's domestic reforms would probably enhance Western security, but that there is nothing the West can do to make this outcome more likely. This conventional wisdom is right on the first count, but wrong on the second. The author supports his conclusion by three bodies of evidence: the effect of the international environment on the domestic politics of great powers in general over the past century; the history of the Soviet Union in particular; and the current constellation of political forces in Gorbachev's Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialists in the study of Soviet foreign policy increasingly feel torn between the positivist culture of political science clepartments and the holistic traditions of the Soviet area-studies programs. In fact, these approaches are largely complementary. Examples taken from literature on Soviet security policy and on the domestic sources of Soviet expansionism show how positivist theories and methods can be used to clarify holist (or traditionalist) arguments, to sharpen debates, to suggest more telling tests, and to invigorate the field's research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]