CHAPTER 9

Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking

 LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Explain the different stages of policymaking
2. Describe the four basic models of decision making
3. Highlight the two major policymaking levels
4. Analyze the critical role that individual beliefs, personality, and crises play
in policymaking

 SUMMARY OVERVIEW
This chapter explains executive branch policymaking through the lens of decisionmaking theory.
The chapter begins with a description of stages of the policymaking process set within historical
context. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to detailing the four primary decisionmaking models
developed by scholars: rational actor, groupthink, governmental politics, and organizational
process. Each model is illustrated with examples from both history and scholarship to show
both their capacity in analyzing real-world policymaking as well as their flaws. The latter part of
the chapter details the influence of cognition, personalities, stress, and crises. Cognition,
perception, and images held by foreign policy decisionmakers are described with historic detail,
illustrating how cognitive shortcuts as well as patterns of perception and misperception can
influence policy outcomes. The role of personality types is colorfully illustrated with a
detailed case study of President Johnson’s political career as well as other minor cases such as
George W. Bush. Finally, the role of duress in crisis situations is shown to exacerbate flaws in
rational decisionmaking and contribute to a number of tendencies associated with poor
policymaking performance.

 CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. CONTEXT: PATTERNS AND POLICYMAKING STAGES
• Historical patterns
o Globalization of foreign policy
o Preeminent global actor
o Rise or restriction of presidential power
o Rise of the NSC over the State Department
o Expansion of the national security bureaucracy
o Rise of agencies not associated with the national security bureaucracy
• Resulting complication of policymaking
• Stages in decisionmaking process
o Agenda setting
➢ Initiatives
➢ Past importance
➢ Domestic and international events

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

68 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking

o Policy formulation
o Policy implementation

II. DECISIONMAKING MODELS

A. The Rational Actor Ideal
• In the rational actor model:
o problems are identified;
o goals are listed and ranked;
o all options are identified and evaluated for their costs
and benefits;
o the optimal policy is chosen given available information; and
o that option is faithfully implemented and its results monitored
and evaluated.
• Historical context: Cuban Missile Crisis
• Ideal type—rational, centralized and responsive
o Pyramid of authority
o Presidential domination
o Direct flow of Information and advice
o Decisions based on advice and information
o EOP staff manages bureaucratic response
• Process often diverges from ideal rational actor model.
B. Groupthink
• “Two minds are better than one.”
• Historical Context: Johnson escalation of Vietnam War
• Small group behavior with: Cohesiveness, esprit de corps, similarities in
the group, strong leader, under duress
• Symptoms
o Overestimate competency
o Stereotype out-groups
o Rationalize decisions
o Pressure to conform, self-censorship
o Illusion of consensus
• Failure and deficiencies
• Examples:
o Reagan’s Iranian initiative
o Bush Persian Gulf crisis
o Bush Jr. post-9/11 response
C. Governmental Politics
• Describes a policymaking process that is neither centralized under the
president nor rational, but rather is based on a pluralistic policymaking
environment where power is diffused and the process revolves around
political competition and compromise among the policymakers
• Governmental politics model—pluralism, diffusion of power,
competition and compromise
• Issues: Important enough to involve multiple agencies; not important
enough to involve the president directly
• Importance:
o Presidential attention selective
o Presidential management style reinforces

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking 69

o Presidential involvement does not equal dominance

• Examples: Reagan, Carter, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama
D. Organizational Process
• Depicts a decentralized government in which the key actors are
bureaucratic organizations rather than the president or a group of
policymakers
• Historical Context: The Challenger and NASA’s space program
o NASA SOP: Delays and expedition
o DOD: Pressure to replace satellites
o Manufacturers: Profit and schedule
• Decentralized government, feudal policymaking
• Incremental implementation
• Organizational model describes the implantation stage of policy making
most powerfully.
o Grenada
o Terrorism
o Post-war reconstruction of Iraq
1. SUMMARY

 A CLOSER LOOK Bureaucratic Planning for Postwar Reconstruction

in Iraq
 THE LIBERTY-SECURITY DILEMMA The Buck Stops Where?

III. TWO GENERAL POLICYMAKING LEVELS

A. Presidential Politics
• Operates when the president becomes interested and active in an issue,
through direct personal involvement or indirectly when his staff and
advisers act in his name
• Open policymaking process may occur in which there is a broad search
for information and policy views and alternatives are aired as suggested
by the rational actor model.
• Closed policymaking for presidential politics may result in a process
more akin to groupthink.
B. Bureaucratic Politics
• Occurs when the president and his closest advisers remain relatively
uninvolved or are unable to dominate the policymaking process
• Turf wars between bureaucratic agencies
• Japan, Mexico, and China policy
• Political process reflecting interactions between bureaucracies
• Tends to prevail in most foreign policy issues

IV. THE ROLE OF PERSONALITY, BELIEFS, AND CRISES

A. The World of Cognition and Images
• The nature of human cognition and perception is how people perceive
and process the world around them.
• “Cognitive theory argues that the mind craves certainty and will work to
establish it even when it is unwarranted by objective conditions.”
(Jack Snyder)

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

70 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking

• Cognitive Principles
o The principle of cognitive structures of belief
o The principle of selective memory
o The principle of selective attention and perception
o The principle of causal inference
o The principle of cognitive stability
• Dominant theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology
o Cognitive consistency theory
➢ Cognitive consistency is that “individuals do not merely
subscribe to a random collection of beliefs” but make
sense of the world by acquiring and maintaining
“coherent systems of beliefs which are internally
consistent.” (Bem 1970:13).
o Schema theory
➢ Schemas are mental constructs that represent different
clumps of knowledge (or comprehension) about various
facets of the environment.
• Patterns of perception and misperception
o Categorizing, stereotyping—The enemy image, mirror image
o Historical analogies
➢ Munich, Dien Bien Phu and Korean War—
Domino theory
➢ Images: Soviet Union and 9/11
o The Enemy Image—You are always “The good guy”
➢ Mirror images
• Four causal inferences:
o A tendency to overestimate or underestimate (internal)
dispositional or (external) situational causes of behavior
o A tendency to overestimate or underestimate one’s importance
o A tendency to overestimate the degree to which the behavior of
others is planned and centralized
o A tendency to overindulge in pessimistic and wishful thinking
B. The Impact of Personality
• Policymakers as motivated tacticians
• Personality: Wilson, Dulles, Johnson, Reagan, Bush, and Obama
o Johnson’s upbringing
o Johnson’s domestic policy impulses
o Johnson’s foreign policy weakness
o George W. Bush and the post-9/11 national security process
o Obama and the deliberative, “benevolent referee”
C. The Role of Crises
• Crises are times that catapult an issue onto the agenda and trigger intense
presidential politics.
o September 11th, 2001
• Emotional and psychological stress—Intensifies personality and inhibits
rational decision-making
o Low-moderate stress levels conducive to rational decision-
making
o Short-term high levels increase elementary task performance

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking 71

o Long-term high levels decrease function

• High: Crisis and stress tend to:
o heighten salience of time,
o reduce size of policymaking group,
o reduce tolerance for ambiguity,
o increase cognitive rigidity,
o encourage selective search for information,
o produce concern for immediate future,
o minimize communication,
o increase ad hoc communication,
o limit alternatives,
o increase likelihood of polarized choice, and
o disrupt complex learning.
➢ Results in a more closed decisionmaking process.
V. THE COMPLEX REALITY OF POLICYMAKING
 A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE The Washington Political Culture

 CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

1. How does decisionmaking theory add to the explanation of managing the foreign
policy bureaucracy?
2. What issues require the president’s attention and what issues can be left up to the foreign
policy bureaucracy? Absent crisis, what criteria should be used to determine which issues
need to be brought to the president’s attention?
3. How much of an impact does individual stress and personality have on foreign policy
making? Given the complexity of foreign policy issues and implementation, how much
does the individual matter in the outcome of the foreign policy process?

 LECTURE LAUNCHERS
1. Begin the class by using the following example: How would the U.S. response to 9/11
been different if Al Gore were president? What personality traits of George W. Bush
shaped the response and how would Gore have made a difference? (You can also use
Obama and McCain or Obama and Romney.)
2. Begin the class by introducing a foreign policy crisis. Call on individual members of the
class to formulate a response quickly and write these policies down. Now divide the class
into groups to formulate responses to the same crisis (or crises). How does the group
deliberated decision differ from the individual decision? Do individuals once put into
groups stick to their original positions or do they change their minds? Use the results to
discuss the different decisionmaking dynamics discussed in the chapter.

 IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
1. If you have access to the verbs in context system (VICS), have students or small groups
compose presidential responses to a current event. Analyze the output as a group.

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

72 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking

• Alternative: Have students compose presidential speeches on a current event.

Distribute speeches to other groups and disentangle the personality, cognitive,
and other effects shown in each speech.
2. Form small groups. Pass out synopses of an attack/crisis. In limited time, have each
compose detailed responses to the crisis with promises of awards for the best group
output. Following the assignment, have each group replay what symptoms of groupthink
arose or could have arisen in this assignment.
3. Have the class formulate responses to a foreign policy crisis. After someone defends their
response to the crisis, identify the schemas used to justify their decision.

 KEY CONCEPTS
agenda setting The process in which an issue must get the attention of governmental officials
and organizations if policy is eventually to be produced.
bureaucratic politics Policymakers and bureaucratic organizations become the key determinants
of policymaking and the interagency process.
cognition and perception How people perceive and process the world around them.
cognitive consistency “Individuals do not merely subscribe to a random collection of beliefs”
but make sense of the world by acquiring and maintaining “coherent systems of beliefs
which are internally consistent” (Bem 1970:13). Therefore, individuals attempt to avoid
the acquisition of information that is inconsistent or incompatible with their belief
systems, especially their central beliefs.
crisis An event that due to its level of surprise, threat to values, and little time to respond is
immediately put onto the agenda.
decisionmaking theory An explanation used to provide analytic perspective on the
policy making process. Four dominant models of decisionmaking theory in foreign
policy are: (1) rational actor, (2) groupthink, (3) governmental politics, and
(4) organizational process.
domino theory A metaphor for containment policy. It was the belief that anything short of a
policy of global containment would result in one country after another falling like
dominoes to communist expansion.
enemy image A schema for viewing the other and forming beliefs about them. It is simplified in
terms of “we are good” and “they are bad”—may be the most simpleminded image of all.
government learning The rational actor model suggests that presidents and other government
officials are receptive to new information and readily adapt to changes in the
environment in order to maximize the opportunity to promote appropriate and
successful policies.
governmental politics Describes a policymaking process that is neither centralized under the
president nor rational, but rather is based on a pluralistic policymaking environment
where power is diffused and the process revolves around political competition and
compromise among the policymakers.
groupthink A concept developed by Irving Janis (1982) as a result of his work in social
psychology. Janis argued that the adage “two minds are better than one” often is not
borne out by the dynamics of small-group behavior. Instead, high cohesiveness and esprit

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking 73

de corps often develop among members of a group. This is true especially when members
have similar backgrounds and beliefs, a strong leader emerges within the group, and the
group faces a stressful situation. Under these circumstances, the group develops a
strong concurrence-seeking tendency, and members tend to conform to group norms
or decisions.
historical analogies According to Jervis (1976:217), “Previous international events provide the
statesman with a range of imaginable situations and allow him to detect patterns and
causal links that can help him understand his world” since “we cannot make sense out of
our environment without assuming that, in some sense, the future will resemble the past.”
But “a too narrow conception of the past and a failure to appreciate the impact of changed
circumstances also result in ‘the tyranny of the past’ upon the imagination.”
ideal type Model that is consistent with the formal organizational charts that portray the
government as extremely hierarchical.
mirror images Each party holds an image that is diametrically opposite the other. In other
words, each party has a positive and benevolent self-image while holding a negative and
malevolent image of the enemy.
motivated tactician A fully engaged thinker who has multiple cognitive strategies available and
chooses among them based on goals, motives, and needs. Sometimes the motivated
tactician chooses wisely, in the interests of adaptability and accuracy, and sometimes the
motivated tactician chooses defensively, in the interests of speed or self-esteem” (Fiske
and Taylor 1999:13).
newgroup syndrome Newly formed groups or groups subjected to drastic changes in
membership or in mode of operation may be particularly susceptible to pathologies of
group deliberation.
organizational process model Depicts a decentralized government in which the key actors are
bureaucratic organizations rather than the president or a group of policymakers.
Policymaking tends to be feudal, with most bureaucratic organizations relatively
autonomous from the political leadership and each other. In this process, U.S. foreign
policy consists of the sum of the various foreign policies produced by the organizations
comprising the foreign policy bureaucracy. In other words, the bureaucracy has become
so large and complex that it is an independent driving force behind policy, and the
president, more often than not, is only the symbolic leader.
personality The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s
distinctive character.
policy formulation The process of identifying and weighing goals and options and the
interaction of policymakers as they arrive at a decision.
policy implementation The stage that the policy decision is carried out by members or agents of
the government.
presidential politics When the president becomes interested and active in an issue, through
direct personal involvement or indirectly when his staff and advisers act in his name.
rational actor model This is the ideal type or model that is consistent with the formal
organizational charts that portray the government as extremely hierarchical. In the
rational actor model: (1) problems are identified; (2) goals are listed and ranked; (3) all
options are identified and evaluated for their costs and benefits; (4) the optimal policy is
chosen given available information; and (5) that option is faithfully implemented and its
results monitored and evaluated.

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

74 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking

schemas Mental constructs that represent different clumps of knowledge (or comprehension)
about various facets of the environment. They necessarily simplify and structure the
external environment, enabling individuals to absorb new information and intelligibly
make sense of the world around them.
stress Mental or emotional strain resulting from demanding circumstances.
Washington political community The place where much of politics and governmental
policymaking intersect, affecting agenda setting, policy formulation, and the
implementation of policy.

 WEB LINKS
Deviating from the ideal rational actor model
(http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/07/18/a_lesson_in_prospect_theory). Explanation
of prospect theory and when decision makers may deviate from the ideal rational actor model.
Emotions in forging policy decisionmaking
(http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/lernerlab/papers/files/The%20Role%20of%20Emotions%20in%2
0Foreign%20Policy%20Decision%20Making.FINAL.pdf). Role of emotions in foreign
policy decisionmaking
Further details of groupthink
(http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm).
Historical analogies (http://www.diplomacy.edu/resources/general/historical-rhetoric-and-
diplomacy-uneasy-cohabitation). Review of the use of historical analogies in foreign policy
decision making
How Biases play out
(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2006/12/27/why_hawks_win). Explanation of how biases
play out in decision making that allows hawkish policies to dominate.

 INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
Allison, Graham T. (1969) “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” American
Political Science Review 58 (September): 698–718. Print
A summary article of what becomes his classic 1971 book.

----------, and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New
York: Longman, 1999. Print.
Updated version of Allison’s 1971 classic analysis of rational actor, governmental
politics, and organizational process models.

Badie, Dina. (2010) “Groupthink, Iraq, and the War on Terror: Explaining US Policy Shift toward
Iraq.” Foreign Policy Analysis 6:4 (October), 277–96. Print.
Excellent analysis of national security policymaking process under President George W.
Bush.

Baker, Peter. (2010) “The Education of a President.” The New York Times Magazine
(October 12).
Excellent article on the difficulty of governing in Washington's political culture as
illustrated through President Obama.

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 9: Decisionmaking Theory and Foreign Policymaking 75

Freidman, William. (1994) “Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House and Political
Psychobiography.” Political Psychology 15: 35–59. Print.
Good overview of the general role of personality and interpersonal relations
on policymaking.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: St. Martins,
1991. Print.
Fascinating psychobiography.

Halperin, Morton H. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 1974. Print.
A classic.

Holsti, Ole R. Crisis Management. In Psychological Dimensions of War, ed. by Betty Glad, 116–
142. Newberry Park, CA: Sage, 1990. Print.
Excellent overview.

Janis, Irving L. Groupthink. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Print.

Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1976. Print.
Terrific overview.

Khong, Yuen Foong. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decision of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.
Highlights the importance historical analogies used during the Vietnam War.

Rosati, Jerel A. (1981) “Developing a Systematic Decisionmaking Framework: Bureaucratic

Politics in Perspective.” World Politics 33: (January), 234–52. Print.
Major critique of bureaucratic politics.

Rosati, Jerel. (2000) “The Power of Human Cognition in the Study of World Politics.”
International Studies Review 2(3): 45–75. Print.
Overview of the impact of beliefs and cognition on policymaking.

-----. (2001) “Ignoring the Essence of Decision,” International Studies Review 3:1 (Spring), 178–
81. Print.
Review of the 1999 revision of Essence of Decision concluding that Allison’s original
1971 book remains superior.

Paul, ’t Hart, Eric K. Stern, and Bengt Sundelius, eds. Beyond Groupthink: Political Group
Dynamics and Foreign Policy-Making. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Print.

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.