Last week Adam Casey and I published a short essay on Putin and personalist regimes. [“The Bully in the Bubble”, ungated]. This is not a post about that. It’s about how difficult it is to reconcile the role of structural forces with choices made by individuals. I do want to say first, though, that I was not a great fan of the title, since it reduces Putin’s motivations to a kind of schoolyard pathology. In fact one of our arguments was that Putin has not been reckless, but his pragmatism is running up against the problems of his personalist rule — unrestrained decision-making, bad intel, and belligerent self-censoring subordinates.

Which gets me to the core problem: integrating individual decision-making into structural explanations of politics. When I teach the Intro to IR course, I delay teaching the levels of analysis, a.k.a. Ken Waltz’s three images, until late in the semester. It’s too powerful — undergraduates start seeing everything in these terms, to the exclusion of other theoretical frameworks.

Maybe because it’s so intuitive. The three images, in case you don’t know, is a way to slice up explanations for outcomes in international politics into three types — the individual, the state, or the international system. So a first-image explanation of World War I would focus on the role of individual choices by people like Gavrilo Princip or Kaiser Wilhelm. A second-image explanation would focus on how state-level variables like nationalism or domestic institutions make conflict more likely. And the third image, Waltz’ favorite, would focus on the structure of relative power and point to things like the rise of Germany, the uncertainty of multipolarity, and the tight alliances that chain-ganged countries into war.

Waltz was on my dissertation committee, and I once asked him how he came up with this typology, which formed the basis of his first book. He said he was studying for comps — looking at causes of war, namely — and became confused by the variety of explanations out there. This basic landmark classification was essentially a way to pass an exam in the 1940s, which goes to show how much of political science is in its infancy.

Waltz is of course famous for elevating the third image into a theory we call structural realism or neorealism (Waltz himself disliked the latter term). But one problem is the rigid separation of levels that has come from doing so. A typical critique of neorealism is that by focusing on the systemic level it ignores the role of individual choices or domestic institutions. This is a self-conscious limitation for Waltz, who is interested in broad recurring patterns rather than specific outcomes, and separates theories of foreign policy (which take individuals and domestic institutions into account) from theories of international politics (which do not).

The realist story about Russian behavior would therefore have little to say about domestic institutions or individual choices. The idea is something like this: the broad motivations driving Russian foreign policy — pursuing primacy in its neighborhood and peer recognition from the West — are geopolitical in nature and therefore not contingent on the choices of a single person. Any Russian leader would chafe against NATO expansion, as Yeltsin did in the 1990s. And any Russian leader would be eager to re-establish Russian dominance in the former Soviet space, by economic means or otherwise. This is why people who hope that Putin’s replacement can spark broader change are likely to be disappointed.

I’ve in fact made a version of that argument myself. So how do we reconcile that story with the all-consuming focus on Putin, not just among pundits but among foreign policy observers who are familiar with the realities on the ground? Is it inconsistent to insist that geopolitics have powerful effects but also examine the role of interpersonal relations and individual decision-making (like Adam and I did here)? I think clearly the answer is no — structure and agency work together — but it’s good to think about why.

A simple and intuitive way to think about structural explanations is in terms of constraints. The anarchy of international politics constrains the choices of policy-makers. Domestic institutions or interest groups constrain what these policy-makers can do. In fact, a key function of institutions is creating formal or informal expectations of behavior that imply restraint, whether due to legal obligations, norms, or the threat of force. Governments and markets are, after all, simply bundles of institutions that restrain its members in both their decisions and their interactions.

The entire idea behind institutions is produce patterned expectations of behavior that domesticate individual choice into an acceptable range of options, and in doing so make complex society possible. Such patterned social behaviors are generated by structural constraints. These are not fixed or permanent and are themselves subject to change by the actors, but nevertheless play a powerful role in shaping short term choices. Actors can of course buck the constraints, and this is why a theory of international politics can not tell us much about specific foreign policy decisions.

“Actors interacting under constraints” is the most human-sounding way I can come up with to describe the co-constitutive nature of the structure-agent relationship. This formulation is true for politics as well as economics, and also highlights both why institutions so often fail and why institutional design is so important — it guides human choices along a set of constraints to produce positive or negative outcomes.

Applied to Russia, we can see how the structural realist vision of Russian geopolitics and the individual-level analysis of Putin’s foreign policy can be reconciled, at least conceptually. Putin as an individual is operating under a set of constraints — basic things like the size of his army, but also the constraints placed on him by the nature of his regime. Personalist regimes like Putin’s, where a single person rather than a party or a military oligarchy control the government, commonly experience informational problems. This happens because their inner circles tighten and become dominated by the security services. In our piece with Adam we noted that Putin’s regime seems to be following some of these tendencies, and while that doesn’t mean he will fall into the same traps, it could make foreign policy decision-making more difficult for him in Ukraine. (Adam has a really good follow-up thread as well in response to some of the feedback.)

In short, even if we grant that there are structural imperatives guiding the establishment of Russian primacy, and structural incentives (and disincentives) created by Putin’s regime, individual choices matter insofar as they interact with these structural constraints in patterned but not always predictable ways.

This is something I had to consider a lot in my first book, which was heavily structural in nature. As I wrote then:

[E]mphasizing large-scale structural determinants of political change involves inevitable trade-offs. History—as historians are quick to point out—unfolds through people rather than structures. Structures don’t wage wars, raze cities, or protest in the streets. The people who do so, however, act in ways that are always and everywhere constrained—by their position in society, by their access to material resources, by their inclusion or exclusion from social groups, and by their underlying (and often unacknowledged) beliefs and assumptions.

…By increasing the salience of systemic pressures, hegemonic shocks raise the general probability of regime transitions. Yet the outcomes of individual transitions are still contingent on the domestic circumstances within each country.

Except in very rare cases, states are not merely passive conduits of external influence. Systemic forces are inevitably mediated through domestic conditions and filtered through local opportunities. At the same time, there are moments when systemic pressures have important and long-lasting effects on the evolution of domestic regimes, and such moments are the focus of this book. My goal here, therefore, is not to downplay the importance of domestic influences but to examine how they interact with the crucial and often-ignored consequences of hegemonic shocks.

There is a reason political scientists favor structural explanations, whether in comparative or international politics. Structural explanations allow us to make generalizable statements by finding recurring patterns, and then empirically test those generalizable statements. Individual choices do not lend themselves to this kind of analysis.

Consider again the causes of World War I. Kaiser Wilhelm was born with his left arm around his neck, causing permanent damage to his arm. He was initially presumed dead, and only brought round by vigorous rubbing which probably worsened the damage.

When Wilhelm was a child it became clear this would be a permanent condition. The arm was not growing properly; the hand had shrunk to a claw. Now think about what’s it’s like to grow up an invalid in the Prussian aristocracy — a culture that prizes physical prowess and martial ability. The Kaiser spent all of his adult life trying to cover up his disability or remedy it. He sprayed it with seawater, massaged and wrapped in cold compresses, bound the good arm so that he would be forced to use the bad one, used body-stretching machines that looked something like the rack. He gave it an “animal baths”, which required the arm to be shoved inside the carcass of a freshly killed animal so that the heat might rejuvenate the tissue. Queen Victoria, his grandmother, thought that one was especially idiotic.

But of course he had to do things like that because he was in a culture where weakness was not tolerated. He had his clothes tailored and he learned to disguise it, even learned to horse-ride and shoot one handed. Scholars and political psychologists have speculated for a long time how much his physical deficiency shaped the Kaiser’s mind and made him eager to prove his manliness — especially to his generals, who knew about his condition. That he will stand up to challengers, that if Russia mobilized its force he would do so too.

Does shoving your hand into a dead animal carcass once a week change how you view the world? I think it might. I’m not sure what it tells us from a generalizable theory perspective though. What do we do with this information, exactly? Other than to say that a person’s individual story — their quirks, sympathies, and paranoias — shape the ways they react with the constraints imposed on them by structural forces.

In that sense, the focus on Putin is not misplaced. Or at least, it’s not inconsistent with the realist-grand-geopolitical story of Russian behavior. Geopolitics shapes Putin’s choices, perhaps in ways he may not even realize, and so do the institutions of his regime. But he has a lot of latitude to convert his individual choices into national policy. Establishing primacy can take many forms, from massing armies on borders to developing economic ties. Putin has chosen the former; the idea that everyone in his position would have done the same is a counterfactual, not a theory. Choices matter even when structural constraints are powerful, but that does not mean generalizable explanations are impossible. Good news whatever side of the structure-agency debate you find yourself on.

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