2 - Foreign policy decision making: assumptions and characterization of the approach

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Foreign policy decision making analyses are viewed as microlevel approaches to world politics (Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, 1971: 315; K. Holsti, 1988: 7–9). This is due to (a) the focus of these approaches on relatively limited and well-defined decisional units, (b) the focus on discrete and limited sequences of events rather than on global processes, trends, or patterns over an extended domain of time and space, and (c) the limited set of issues they seek to explain. Decision making approaches offer a limited, but very useful, outlook of politics as a problem-solving process.

Despite their limited scope and their seeming reductionist nature, foreign policy decision making approaches are essential to a thorough examination of world politics. As Bueno de Mesquita and Singer (1973: 238) put it: “no matter how many types of predictor variables we use in our model, or how many levels of analysis we embraced, we fall short of explanation until we demonstrate how the individuals who made (or acquiesced in) the key decisions served as the ‘causal’ link in the sequence [of events or processes to be explained].”

Decision making is often assumed to have an intervening rather than an exogenous role in explanations of international relations and national behavior. It is the glue that connects basic explanatory factors at the systemic, national, and societal levels to national and international behavior.