Foreign Policymaking and Group Dynamics: Where We've Been and Where We're Going

Abstract

Research on foreign policymaking has focused on the policy process and the organizational context around policy decisions to explain foreign policy behavior. This research tradition includes multiple theories and a wide variety of methodologies; it demonstrates complex relationships among foreign policy factors, and it links its scholarly research to practical policy concerns (see, for example, Neack, Hey, and Haney 1995; Hudson 2002). This essay focuses on one piece of this diverse picture—the study of decision groups—as a means of bridging the individual and organizational levels of analysis. In complex foreign policy cases involving uncertainty, political controversy, and conflicting values, members of decision groups (like the US president's inner circle) become central to the judgment process by defining the nature of the problem and presenting appropriate options for discussion. The more than thirty years of scholarship examining group dynamics provide us with a strong basis on which to determine when understanding what is happening in decision groups is critical to the study of foreign policy. An important claim in this literature is that group decision making (broadly defined) is relevant to understanding what presidents, prime ministers, and other foreign policy actors do in the foreign policy arena—even as the definition of what constitutes foreign policy and how foreign policy actors interact is expanded. This essay will assess past research on group decision making in order to set the stage for a discussion of the paths that future research might take. Two classics, Graham Allison's (1971) Essence of Decision and Irving Janis' (1972) Victims of Groupthink , serve as the starting point. An overview of the contributions of these pieces will be followed by critiques that provide a baseline to propose alternative avenues for the study of group decision making in the next two decades. In the process, we will consider …