Discrepant Responses to Falling Dictators: Presidential Belief Systems and the Mediating Effects of the Senior Advisory Process

Abstract

Cognitive and advisory process theories usually are cast as competing explanations of decision-making in U.S. foreign policy. They are more appropriately approached as complementary components of a single explanation, in which the independent variable of the President's belief system is mediated by the intervening variable of the senior advisory process. The extent of the mediating effect is afunction of the degree and nature of senior advisor unity: weakest when there is senior advisor disunity, and strongest when there is dissenting unity. The cases of the Carter administration policy toward the Shah of Iran and the Reagan administration policy toward President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines bear out these hypotheses. In the CarterIran case the initial dissenting unity of Carter's top advisors caused support for the Shah to be much greater than predicted by the president's belief system propensities. The senior advisor disunity which emerged as the crisis worsened had much less of a mediating effect, and thus decisions came to more closely reflect the non-interventionist strategic view at the core of Carter's belief system. In the Reagan-Philippines case, initially the president's propensities to support Marcos were reinforced by the unanimity of his top advisors. The key decisions in 1985-86 which culminated in abandoning Marcos were the result of the transformation of the advisory process to dissenting unity and the consequent strong mediating effect. In thus demonstrating the interactive relationship between beliefs and process, these cases help establish the need for integrative theory.