ABSTRACT
In his seminal 1971 book Essence of Decision, Harvard Professor Graham Allison examined decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis from three different perspectives: Rational Actor, Organizational Behavior, and Government Politics. In summary, the Rational Actor model assumes internally consistent decisions based on clear goals. The Organizational Behavior model suggests that decisions are often based on planned, standard operating procedures of governmental organizations. The third model, Governmental Politics, begins from the assumption that decisions are made by players with no consistent set of strategic goals, “according to various conceptions of national, organizational and personal goals; players who make governmental decisions not by a single, rational choice but by the pulling and hauling that is politics.”2
