Decision Strategies in Politics

Abstract

A decision strategy is a set of mental and physical operations that a decision maker uses to reach a choice among two or more alternatives. Once the alternatives have been identified, a decision strategy involves gathering information about at least some of the different alternatives under considerations and making judgments about them. A decision strategy will include a mechanism for selecting the best alternative—for example, select the alternative with the highest probability of success. Decision strategies differ along two primary dimensions: how much information is gathered, and how comparable that information is across alternatives. Four major types of decision strategies include classic rational choice (relatively deep search, equally distributed across alternatives), confirmatory motivated reasoning (relatively deep search, unequally distributed across alternatives), fast and frugal (relatively shallow search, equally distributed across alternatives), and heuristic-based intuitive (shallow search, unequally distributed across alternatives). Although standard rating scales have been developed to help ascertain which strategies a decision maker prefers, the best method for determining which strategy is being employed is to directly observe information gathering while the decision is being made. An important task for future research is to more clearly explicate the situations when different decision strategies perform particularly well or particularly poorly.