Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a decision making approach to foreign policy analysis. This approach focuses on the decision process, dynamics, and outcome, highlighting the role of psychological factors in foreign policy decision making. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples that are woven into the text. The cases and examples, which are written in an accessible style, include decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to coverage of the rational model of decision making, levels of analysis of foreign policy decision making, and types of decisions, the book includes extensive material on alternatives to the rational choice model, the marketing and framing of decisions, cognitive biases and errors, and domestic, cultural, and international influences on decision making in international affairs. Existing textbooks do not present such an approach to foreign policy decision making, international relations, American foreign policy, and comparative foreign policy.
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Process of decision-making in foreign policy depends on different factors. Through considering factors of decision-making in foreign policy, national leaders use a set of rules to apply to different situations when they deal with international affairs. There are two approaches that influence process of decision-making. The first one is external factors that limit the choices of states regardless of their political system, history and culture. In other words external factors refer to systemic pressures of international relations that affect behavior of all states in process of foreign policy decision-making. The second one is internal factors that refer to various viewpoints and set of expectations in domestic environment of the states. In other words, despite to the same systemic pressures, states behave differently because their internal sources such as different political systems, cultures, and leaders influence their reactions to systemic pressures. After explaining meanings of foreign policy and decision-making, this article tends to review the external and internal factors of decision-making and explain how they influence process of foreign policy.
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Integrating Cognitive and Rational Theories of Foreign Policy Decision Making - Chapter 1
There are currently two “schools” of thought in political decision making in general and foreign policy decision making in particular: the rational choice school and the cognitive psychology school. This book introduces a theory of decision making that integrates elements of both schools.
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Policy Studies Journal 41(S1)
This article reviews major decision-making models with an emphasis on basic theoretical perspectives as well as on how these models explain foreign policy decision making and national and international security decisions. Furthermore, we examine how these models have been utilized in explanations of various international crises. Specifically, for each model, we present examples drawn from the literature on applications of the respective model to foreign policy and national security decisions. The theories we have reviewed are as follows: rational choice, cybernetic model, prospect theory, poliheuristic theory, organizational and bureaucratic politics, groupthink and polythink, and analogical reasoning. We also review the Applied Decision Analysis method, and the concept of biases in decision making.
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