The first wave of the International Relations subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis occurred from 1954 to 1994, encompassing a founding period (the 1950s and 1960s) and a period of first consolidation (the 1970s to the end of the Cold War). The early years of the 1950s and 1960s produced some of the defining works that would indelibly shape the character of the field. The work of Richard Snyder, James Rosenau, and Harold and Margaret Sprout molded the field with their focus on decision-making processes, political psychology, cross-national analysis, and actor-specific theory. The subsequent first-wave work, which dealt with small-group dynamics, organizational process, bureaucratic politics, leader personality, cognition and heuristics, culture, domestic political contestation, and national attributes, blended with an understanding of international and regional systemic effects, became FPA classics.
Peddling Macroeconometric Modeling and Quantitative Policy Analysis: The Early Years of the SSRC’s Committee on Economic Stability, 1959-1963