The Role of Threat Perception in National Security Strategy Development

• In Event: Pioneering Research on Leaders and Elites in Foreign Policy

Abstract

When new security issues emerge, how do policy-makers arrive at their preferences for how to respond? In these circumstances, individual-level preferences are important because individuals wield greater influence over policy outcomes when institutions do not (yet) have clear vested interests. In this paper, I offer a theory linking subjective threat perception to individual-level policy preferences. This approach builds on prior work that has emphasized the importance of psychological processes in foreign policy decision-making. Using a new corpus of documents produced by elite policy-makers during the early Cold War, I show that my theory is able to predict individual-level preferences for specific elements within national security strategies (e.g., NSC-68), including those that appear mutually contradictory. I also test several competing models of preference formation and change, including the importance of bureaucratic roles and information shocks, as well as the social pressure to conform with peers. Analytically, I rely on traditional qualitative hand-coding of text and new computational tools. In particular, I use pretrained language models to generate several new quantities of interest, both for hypothesis testing and hand-coding validation.

Author

• Marika Landau-Wells, University of California, Berkeley