Operational Code Analysis

Abstract

Johnston (1995) argues that any strategic culture should have assertions about the nature of the world, usefulness of the application of force, and actors’ ranked preferences for conflictual and cooperative outcomes. Johnston also suggests that, ideally, strategic cultures should be extracted across time and actors. To achieve this goal, he suggests two content analysis methods for discerning strategic cultures: cognitive mapping and symbol analysis. This chapter, however, argues that the combination of a targeted operational code analysis and the Theory of Inferences about Preferences (TIP) provides a capable and agile alternative for extracting strategic cultures. Operational code analysis has specific indices for the nature of the world and the usefulness of cooperative and conflictual means. On the other hand, TIP extracts agents’ ranked preferences for political outcomes. Using the rules of sequential game theory, the combination of operational code analysis and TIP provides the necessary tools to extract the strategic culture of an actor toward a specific or a general Other across time and space. As a case study, this chapter applies the above method to map the strategic cultures of Iran and the United States based on the media coverage of Iran's nuclear program between 1989 and 2018.