Pioneering Research on Leaders and Elites in Foreign Policy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel features new research that provides fresh perspectives on the role of leaders and foreign policy elites in international politics. The explosion of interest in individuals and leaders in IR is being supplemented by a turn to understanding how leaders interact with others inside government. By combining the existing literature on leaders with the resurgence in studies of foreign policy advisors and bureaucracies, the panelists push forward our understanding of these dynamics in two ways. First, the papers shed new light on the causes of leader-elite behavior. McManus explains why leaders gain reputations as madmen and Lindsey examines why bureaucrats choose to conceal certain meetings and publicize others. Second, other papers on the proposed panel investigate the consequences of leader-elite interactions. Carson and Weil address how leader management styles effect the information the bureaucracy provides (Carson and Weil), Jost and Casler show how uncoordinated bureaucratic signals impact the credibility of threats, and Landau-Wells analyzes how advisor threat perceptions shape which national security policies they endorse. In the aggregate, the papers address a diverse range of foreign policy settings, including intelligence, diplomacy, and military affairs. Methodologically, the papers share a commitment to using novel data sources and methods, including visual data, cutting edge text analysis methods, new hand-coding and dataset construction, and tapping recently declassified documents. Together, the research featured in this panel will advance the field's understanding of the causes and consequences of varied kinds of elites in international politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Chair

• Elizabeth Nathan Saunders Columbia University

Discussants

• Matthew Fuhrmann Texas A&M University

• Robert Schub Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Individual Presentations

• All over the Map: Leaders and Micromanagement in the Vietnam War - Austin Carson, University of Chicago; Ari Weil, University of Chicago

• Bureaucracy, Signaling, and International Crises - Tyler C. Jost, Brown University; Donald Casler, University of Illinois

• How Leaders Develop Reputations for Madness - Roseanne McManus, Pennsylvania State University

• The Role of Threat Perception in National Security Strategy Development - Marika Landau-Wells, University of California, Berkeley

• Secret Meetings - David Lindsey, Baruch College, CUNY