Unit 5: Decision Making Processes in Foreign Policy and Sub- State Actors: Bureaucracy, Interest Groups, Pressure Groups, Public Opinion, Media

Introduction

Manufacturing consent: A term coined by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). Lippman felt that in order for democracy to thrive, public opinion should have been managed. This was because of the nature of public opinion as a blunt force that could stir policy in irrational directions. In their book titled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky further elaborated the concept arguing that the acceptance of government policies by the people of the United States was partly facilitated by mass media and institutions serving a system-supportive propaganda function. This process also included denying the people the ability to access differing views that could lead to them opposing the policies supported by the system. Hence, in their opinion this becomes a propaganda model that promotes the values of the governing elites.

Key Concepts and Models in Decision Making Process

Decision-making is a process of making choices. It involves coming to a decision by way of gathering relevant information and evaluating possible alternatives. The decision making process involves a set of steps that the decision-maker goes through in order to make cohesive decisions. When it comes to the issue of foreign policy, decision-making could be viewed as a process of reaching different political objectives. In foreign policy literature, the core assumption is that foreign policy is run by individuals, “acting alone or in concert with others and taking advantage of opportunities or acting within constraints.” (Breuning, 2007, p.59). As Morin and Paquin (2018, p.102), states, “the decision making process in foreign policy varies as a function of the leaders’ management style”. What creates different foreign policy styles in today’s globalized world is related to how leaders approach their country’s foreign policy priorities. In other words, different ideas, worldviews, logics of action, management styles lead to different foreign policy decision making processes and, hence, different foreign policy decisions.

Decision units are the individuals or group of individuals, (for example an executive committee such as a National Security Council) who are able, authorized and responsible for making foreign policy decisions while also preventing any other government agency from unequivocally altering, suspending or blocking that decision

Implementation is a different way of naming decision-making. However, the concepts implementation and decision-making should not be used interchangeably since not every decision needs to be implemented. In other words, implementation is described as “a set of discrete acts or as a process” (Evans and Newnham, 1998, p. 245).

A common sense, colloquial definition of foreign policy decision-makers could be made as, units making decisions in the name of global political actors concerning their external environment. Apparently, it is not always an easy task to define who are the decision-makers. Especially in a democratic state, the decisions are usually taken as a result of a collective process based on collective deliberation. As a result, most foreign policy decisions could be viewed as taken by a group of individuals providing their ideas and insights, contributing their expertise and feedback and participating in the shaping of the outcome through a process of deliberation and negotiation. It is assumed that this process is characterized by rationality. Fundamentally the assumption about rationality of the decision-makers is that they act upon objective data and prefer a formal process of analysis to intuition and subjectivity. Ideally, the model also assumes that the decision maker has full or perfect information (a state where all data germane to a particular issue, decision, is known and available) on the circumstances of the situation and about the alternatives available.

Cognitive Miser is a concept that refers to the tendency of human beings to avoid spending computational effort and resorting to facile ways in solving problems. This phenomena is accepted as a natural tendency that is had regardless of the level of intelligence of the person.

Political leaders are decision-makers that are human beings like the rest of us. Much like the rest of us, they suffer from cognitive biases that distorts their minds, leading to deviations in their perception and judgment of the situation from the reality of the challenge before them. They usually are as vulnerable to cognitive dissonances. Therefore, when they are left in a position that leaves them in between their long held ideas, beliefs and values and circumstances contradicting the said ideas, beliefs and values, they try to resolve it by adapting their perception of the situation rather than adopting their behavior to the reality of it. This could be done by either creating a new cognition of the reality they face by adding new parts or ignoring and denying information that leads to the dissonance etc. Also, decision-makers resort to heuristics, or more simply put “rules of thumb”, like the rest of us. Human brain is “hardwired to find patterns in complexity” and finds solace in avoiding it. It naturally prefers simple explanations to complex ones as “logic and deductive reasoning take a lot of energy” (Hudson, 2007, p. 42). This is an important reason why it is easy for the general public and non -specialists to subscribe to conspiracy theories. All of these factors make decision-makers prone to become cognitive misers as often as the rest of us, clouding, destabilizing and faulting the decision-making processes on foreign policy.

Conspiracy Theories “Conspiracy” is derived from the Latin word conspirare. It means ‘to breath together’ and signifies the coming together of a number of individuals in order to act in complicity to reach a desired outcome. As the world around us gets intractably complex and the pace and quantity of the information flow that the general public is exposed outruns its cognitive ability, and depth of knowledge, required for processing it, “conspiracy theories have migrated from the margins of the society to the center ground of politics and public life and have become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary political and public culture” as an “epistemological quick fix” (Byford, 2011, Conspiracy theories emphasize the human agency’s intentional role over that of structure. They overlook historical causality and attribute causality to human agency’s capabilities of design and determination. On the one hand, they are over-generalizing, while on the other, they are reductionist. They simplify events usually by reducing an output that has been produced by diverse, multiple inputs into a single cause outcome, making it more intelligible for the general-public in the process. “Conspiracies are especially likely to become popular when they feed already existing prejudices or superstitions” (Grüter, 2004, p. 70). The current pervasiveness and popularity of conspiracy theories may also be attributed to them being convenient vehicles for aspirant politicians and self-proclaimed experts in their vie for attention, legitimacy and influence

A famous quote generally attributed to American politician Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill states that “All politics is local”. Undoubtedly the domestic political landscape does have a profound effect in shaping foreign policy. The strength of the government, the domestic political climate, the relations amongst political parties and between them and civil society have an important bearing on the decision making environment on foreign policy. After all, usually the most important element of decision-making process in foreign policy is the “political struggle and bargaining between groups” (Dougherty & Pfaltzgraff, 1990, p. 477) within a given polity. The aim for all actors involved in this process is, “to maximize its interests, agendas, and goals” (Allison, 1971, p.257).

Linkage politics is defined as “a recurrent sequence of behaviour that originates in one state and is reacted in another” (Rosenau, 1969, 45). Growing linkages between the international system and domestic environment, where foreign policy decisions are made, forces foreign policy analysts to re-examine the role of the state as the exclusive sentinel governing the relations of their own society with the rest of the world. Rosenau identified three kinds of linkages. Reactive linkages are observed when an event in one society leads to an impromptu reaction in another. Here governments play no role. This might be exemplified by the reactions that Turkish society shows to the events between the Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Emulative linkages happen when a development in one society is imitated by another. The events of the socalled Arab Spring that started in Tunis in 2010 quickly spreading to Libya, Egypt, and Syria are a case in point. Finally, Rosenau points out to penetrative linkages. What he means here is deliberate attempts of elements of one society to influence and, at times, manipulate the other. Such attempts usually involve soft power and utilize means like public diplomacy, but might also include lobbying and propaganda activities.

The interconnectedness between foreign policy and domestic politics is mostly expressed through political economy models. As stated by Mesquita and Smith (2012, p.163), these models “assess foreign policy choices within a game theoretic perspective, identifying equilibrium behavior induced by domestic political concerns including policy preferences and domestic institutional structures”. Other than that, the significance of decision makers in foreign policy analyses can be related to the ones who make foreign policy decisions. According to literature, foreign policy choices are made by individuals like national leaders. For that reason, the primary point of researches on the linkage between domestic politics and foreign policy is the agency issues. In particular, “domestic institutional structures, such as the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of governance and the extent to which government is accountable and transparent or personalist and opaque, are also viewed as central to shaping the interplay between domestic and international leaders, elites, and ordinary citizens” (Mesquita and Smith, 2012, p. 163).

Issue area is a term used first by Robert Dahl (1961) as an important element of a political system, but Dahl has not defined the conception of issue-area in a definite way. As stated by Sher (1977, p.44), Dahl labeled three issue-areas “which were of relevance to governmental and nongovernmental leadership, these being urban development, education and nominations”. In this sense, James Rosenau has taken Dahl’s approaches to issue-area and took it one step further. For Rosenau, the conception of issue-area composed of “(i) a cluster of values, the allocation or potential allocation of which (ii) leads the affected or potentially affected actors to differ so greatly over (a) the way which the values should be allocated or (b) the horizontal levels at which the allocations should be authorized that (iii) they engage in distinctive behavior designed to mobilize support for the attainment of their particular values” (Rosenau, 1971, p.141). To put it simply, Rosenau proposed four issue areas in his seminal piece of pre-theory as territorial, status, human resources, and non-human resources.

Sub-State Actors in Decision Making Process in Foreign Policy

Internal Sources of Foreign Policy

There are some internal factors that influence foreign policy decisions, such as bureaucracy, interest groups, pressure groups, media and public opinion. Along with such an interchangeability, think-tanks are also one of those sub-state actors that create an impact on foreign policy. With respect to its meaning, one can state that “a think tank is an independently financed research institute concerned with the study of international relations and foreign policy issue areas” (Evans and Newnham, 1998, p.531-2).

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is any wide-reaching group of assigned officials in order to execute foreign policy decisions of the decision makers. The first usage of bureaucracy was when Max Weber (1864-1920) described the term as the most affective way to establish an organization and administration. Besides, its complex structure of offices, tasks, and rules shape bureaucracy as a large scale institution in order to coordinate the work of employees.

Interest Groups

An interest group is a group of people who share out a common interest. Putting it differently, these are organized groups of individuals that have an attraction on governments when it comes to foreign policy decisions. Labor unions, lobby groups, important figures in business, religious groups might be viewed as interest groups and each of them has distinctive characteristic when it comes to their impacts on foreign policies in their countries. Most interest groups have a participation system in which they can easily get in touch with each other in order to fulfill their goals whatever these goals are. When they interact with governments, interest groups mostly do two main things. First, interest groups attempt to shape policies by mobilizing the voters or through the way of putting direct pressure on officials. Second, they sometimes prefer to gather information for officials when the need arises. Interest groups aim to influence governments and their policies; however, political parties exist carrying aim of holding political power. When it comes to its dictionary meaning, interest groups can consist of any collection of people organizing an event to support something in foreign policy. Most interest groups have three characteristics in common within the scope of the study of Morin and Paquin (2018). In the first place, they are able to affect governments for which they should collaborate with other governments. Secondly, the primary coalitions safeguarding economic and political interests utilize comparable ways of their actions. Lastly, interest groups can pull strings during the preparatory phase of the decision making process in foreign policy.

Pressure Groups

Pressure groups can mostly be defined as a group of people who share particular political interests. They aspire to increase the level of awareness about some political or social dissident, which is one of the interests of the community by gaining publicly support. As interest groups do, pressure groups also aim to influence governments, not take power themselves. For affecting governments, pressure groups are able to work in different environments with multiple variety of people through different ways like lobbying, media campaigning, and demonstrations. Within the scope of its multiple social environment of pressure groups, it may be said that the existence of pressure groups enhances pluralism in a society.

The Role of Media and Public Opinion in Foreign Policy

Considering one of the fundamental elements in the domestic milieu of states, there is a debate around the conception of public opinion of which discuss that whether public opinion determines foreign policy directly or not. Until the midst of 1970s, the concept of public opinion has been approached exceedingly critical by many scholars. In fact, public opinion was discerned as “being incoherent, volatile and capricious” (Morin and Paquin, 2018, p. 168). Another scholar, Almond (1960) has approached to public opinion in the same vein with Morin and Paquin (2018). For Almond (1960), “public opinion was assumed to be volatile and emotional concerning foreign policy issues” (Powlick and Katz, 1998, p.30).

Within the scope of foreign policy, one can claim that public opinion is likely to be framed in a graded way with an attentive public facilitating between the mass public and decision makers in foreign policy. Attentive public is a concept used to provide a framework for researches on public opinion. One can define attentive public as the “proportion of the people in mass society who hold articulate, informed and coherent attitudes about public policy issues” (Evans and Newnham, 1998, p. 38).

Media means the primary tool of mass communication through broadcasting, adversaries, publishing and the internet in order to reach and influence people extensively. Putting it differently, it is a sort of communication channel which news, entertainment products, adversaries are delivered to mass public widely. In that vein, it is noteworthy to take into consideration of how Rosenau has approached to media within the framework of foreign policy. As quoted from Rosenau by Powlick and Katz (1998, p.29), the role of media is “to circulate opinions between decision makers and elites whom he labeled opinion makers”. Considering this, one can claim that media is not just a random envoy among governments and publics. Besides, it would be also wrong to state that media contemplates public opinion straightaway.

The influence of media on foreign policy goes above and beyond an unbiased public with an impact upon decision makers in foreign policy. Firstly, media can exert pressure on major agents in foreign policy to follow a stance on foreign policy problems which have been disregarded at one point. Secondly, as it is explained by the cognitive approaches to foreign policy, one can claim that human mind is limited, and it is impossible to absorb all the relevant knowledge from the social environment. On account of this, decision makers in foreign policy need some reliable sources for learning how public approaches to their foreign policy decisions. That is why, foreign press reports and editorial notes in principal newspapers are able to exert influence on decision makers’ ideas and core beliefs on foreign policy issues. In the subject of media nexus foreign policy, there has been a concept, which is CNN effect, used to explain such an influence on national leaders. CNN effect is a term used to portray “… circumstances in which news media coverage directly affects foreign policy decision-making, causing policy makers to pursue course of action that, in the absence of media pressure, they would not have embarked upon” (Smith, Hadfield, and Dunne, 2008, p.390).