| Is a systematic crossnational explanation possible for how executive foreign policy makers achieve their desired goals? One begins by asking: Whence do these policy makers derive their power? The metaphysics of the explanation is interactive. Rather than forcing data or concepts into a procrustean bed of cuestick-to-billiard ball cause-and-effect, systematic qualitative comparison highlights the causality of necessary and sufficient conditions for intended and unintended outcomes in multilevel foreign policy making processes. One may also derive from the same type of explanation an account of critics' failures to divert policy makers along alternative pathways.;If foreign policy is operationalized as documentable or inferrable leadership preferences for a future state of affairs, events maintaining or modifying the status quo in external affairs deserve sustained attention. Precedent, executive initiative and stretched organizational pluralism are clusters of variables in the Social Process Model accounting for outcomes during specified time periods.;The Social Process Model "de-blackboxes" society, paying sustained and detailed attention to how executive foreign policy makers share power willingly and unwillingly, inside and outside government, inside and outside society. The Social Process Model uncovers the etiology of foreign policy making processes better than system-level or bureaucratic process models. Among other contributions, the Social Process Model uncovers opportunity costs of alternative pathways for policy makers. The Social Process Model's comparative methodology illuminates Philippine and Japanese foreign policy exemplars during three time periods, utilizing declassified cablegrams, speeches, public documents, newspaper articles, photographs, television talk-shows, memoirs, interviews, quantitative data and secondary accounts.;The Social Process Model thereby reveals a flaw in President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos's contribution to "regional" rapprochement in South East Asia in 1967. Next, candidate and President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino's fragmented military relations policy towards the USA is reinterpreted in light of the imperatives of early redemocratization during December 1985-December 1987. In a third period, likely limits on the power of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of interested nongovernmental organizations in post-June 1992 official development assistance policy making are specified.;Finally, these analytic narratives have generated a series of crossnationally testable propositions. |
