Bureaucrats Versus the Ballot Box in Foreign Policy Decision Making

Abstract

The bureaucratic politics model and the poliheuristic theory are used to examine how political advice presented in various contexts influences choice. Organizational advisers who offer endogenous political advice are compared with situations in which the decision maker is offered advice by a separate, or exogenous, political adviser. Results show that decision makers are influenced by political evaluations in a noncompensatory manner, even when this advice is endogenously presented, and that political evaluations (and foreign policy choices) can be affected by the presence of multiple bureaucratic advisers. These findings have significant implications for how information is presented in advisory group settings.