Foreign policy decision making

The foreign policy decision-making process is a major focus of FPA scholarship seeking to unlock and explain the complexities of state conduct in the international system. In this regard, rationality and its application to foreign policy decision making is one of the most influential approaches to understanding contemporary international politics. Derived from public choice theory (which itself emerged out of the fields of economics and policy sciences), rational choice scholars have actively sought to utilize a well-established methodology of decision making to enhance and assess foreign policy decision making. Applying this approach to the task of modelling the complex environment of foreign policy decision making has, nonetheless, posed new challenges for rationalists.1 The result has been the development of innovations in modelling choice in areas as diverse as nuclear strategy and trade negotiations, which have become influential in academic and foreign policy making circles. The use of rationalist approaches to analyse foreign policy decision

making, at the same time, has inspired considerable commentary and criticism. Indeed, the formative work of FPA has been devoted to assessing the weaknesses of this school of thought and its links to realist assumptions.2 This critique of rationalist accounts of foreign policy decision making is rooted as much in its inability to accurately capture the actual foreign policy process as in the problems posed by some of its foundational assumptions. Culling from studies of political psychology and cognitive theory, FPA scholars have focused on the centrality of the mind of the decision maker, its powerful effect on the framing of particular foreign policy issues and the consequent impact on the formulation and selection of policy options. The subsequent research conducted into the role of perceptual factors and cognitive

in foreign policy. Yet there remains within much of FPA a desire to retain adherence

to a broadly rationalist description of foreign policy decision making. Notions such as ‘bounded rationality’, which seek to account for the distorting effects of partial information and narrowing perceptions, are suggestive of the continuing relevance of rational choice theory – albeit somewhat reconstituted in light of criticisms – to any accounts of the decision-making process. James Rosenau’s clarion call to identify variables and rigorous methodologies to better organize the study of foreign policy – which led to the ill-fated comparative foreign policy research programme – while embracing much of the critique of rationalism in setting out his FPA ‘pre-theories’ nonetheless seeks to frame the research agenda squarely within the realm of positivism.3

The ‘pull of rationalism’ as a method, however attenuated to account for critiques, remains an important dimension of FPA. The result is that contemporary scholars have developed new methodological approaches to foreign policy decision making which are explicitly aimed at reconciling the contingencies of rationality with the insights derived from its various critics.