Session 8; Bureaucratic Politics, Who makes the Decisions ?

Allison and Halperin, in their article called ‘Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications’ provides an alternative approach to understand the decision making process in foreign policy.  Here he focuses on the further development of “Model III,” recognizing that organizations can be included as players in the game of bureaucratic politics, treating the factors emphasized by an organizational process approach as constraints, developing the notion of shared attitudes, and introducing a distinction between “decision games” and “action games.”

He says that there is not a single decision maker, rather a whole body who are responsible for the decision making. He tries to explain that foreign policies made are result of a lot of political actors and not just a single politician.

 An interesting thing in this article was the idea of senior and junior players; senior players being the major political actors and the ones who make all the decisions and juniors being those who only carry out the decisions taken by the senior players. This is something present in every political organization. Then, the authors also said that there is never a single national interest. As policies are made by negotiations between different political actors, so there can never be a single dominant interest, it is always that different options are looked at and then majority votes for one (keeping different factors in mind).

I agree with the author’s explanation that there is never a single person taking decisions when it’s the matter regarding foreign policies or other governmental decisions. Often what people do is that they blame that sole minister or a single government official for the wrong decision however it is not just him who is making those decisions, rather there is a whole body of people who have discussions and then take a decision together. And lastly, the authors have given us a new idea that interaction between states is not the same as interaction between individuals and if we want to understand state, then we need to understand the people within it.