Disaggregating the State: Leaders, Policy Elites and Small Groups in IR

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As the field of international relations has become increasingly attentive to the importance of investigating the microfoundations of extant theories, it has moved from the state level to the individual level, but in the process neglected to explain how exactly micro-level mechanisms interact to produce concrete foreign policy outcomes. This panel therefore aims to provide new perspectives on the key domestic components of decision-making processes: leaders, policy elites, and accompanying small-group and bureaucratic settings. Max Kuhelj Bugaric thus focuses on small-group temporal discounting in foreign policy decision-making; namely, the social psychology literature has found that discounting rates of individual group members converge on the mean discounting rate of the group, which he tests and expounds upon in the context of decision-making in the US National Security Council. Jonathan Renshon and Keren Yarhi-Milo introduce a new type of evidence into the debate about reputation, presenting the results from original surveys fielded on four samples (from foreign decision-makers, foreign publics, and American IR scholars) to study the reputation costs incurred by various actors as a result of the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ongoing Syrian civil war. Their results suggest that reputations costs do indeed exist, that they are worse in cases of failed threats, and that they attach to both leaders and the countries they represent. Brad LeVeck examines whether international policy elites exhibit behavior that is consistent with both rationality and mutual knowledge rationality across a set of games, and finds that, unlike convenience sample subjects, a high percentage of elites consistently act as if they are rational; however, very few elites consistently act as if they believe that all other elites are rational as well. Finally, Robert Schub examines the tradeoff between acquiring maximal information and maintaining secrecy that state leaders face when considering covert actions, with the question of how leaders adjudicate between the competing pressures hinging on several international and domestic factors, including the distribution of expertise across state bureaucracies. His analysis thereby sheds new light on links between information and conflict while bringing domestic constraints to the fore.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 19: International Security

Individual Presentations

• Small-Group Temporal Discounting in Foreign Policy Decision-Making - Max Kuhelj Bugaric, Harvard University

• Mutual Knowledge Rationality among International Policy Elites - Brad L. LeVeck, University of California, Merced

• Are Red Lines Red Herrings? - Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Keren Yarhi-Milo, Princeton University

• The Information-Secrecy Tradeoff in Covert Actions - Robert Schub, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Chair

• Emilie Marie Hafner-Burton University of California, San Diego

Discussants

• Tyler C. Jost Brown University

• Jessica L. P. Weeks University of Wisconsin-Madison