ABSTRACT
After probing the origins of the decision-making approach in pure theories of decision-making from Dewey (synoptic-rational approach), Herbert Simon (‘satisficing’/‘bounded rationality’), Charles Lindblom and David Braybrooke (‘marginal’ and ‘disjointed’ incrementalism), Etzioni (‘mixed scanning’), this chapter shows how the situational and cognitive aspects of decision-making were conjoined in Richard Snyder et al.’s (1954) behaviouralist monograph and diagrams of State X as a Situational Actor and internal setting in interactions between two countries. After a critique and evaluation of the Snyder Scheme, it breaks down the intellectual sub-process of foreign policy decision-making (FPDM): cybernetic, psychological and cognitive. Then it discusses the cybernetic viewpoint of Karl Deutsch; the cognitive tools of Ole Holsti’s concepts of ‘mindsets’ of key decision-makers, ‘belief system’, ‘operational code’; E. Boulding’s ‘image’, and Deborah Larson’s ‘schema’, to launch a comprehensive analysis of G.T. Allison’s Bureaucratic Politics Model (BPM). After a detailed critique of the BPM, and brief discussion of the BPM’s later testing and/or modifications by Morton Halperin, Jerel Rosati, Barbara Kellerman, Thomas Hammond, Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, David Kozak, Philip Zelikow, etc., the chapter shows how studies of FPDM have since entered into a non-paradigmatic third generation.
