Session 8- Behind the States.

Allison and Halperin, in their article called ‘Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications’ deconstruct the entire sequence of decision-making and establish that governmental decisions are not taken by a  particular entity, instead there is an entire body of people who are responsible for policy making. Therefore, foreign policies are a product of the ideas and interests of a large number of political actors rather than just a single person. These political figures then work together to design national policy.

Moreover, the authors talk about senior players and junior players. They say that senior players are the major political figures who ‘dominate in decision games’ and junior players are ‘charged with carrying out the decision’. This can be seen in almost all political organizations. For example, in Germany, Hitler would classify as the senior player because he was in charge of making the general policies whereas his private army, the SS and SA could come under the label of junior players as it was their job to make sure that his policies were implemented. And they managed to do so by using terror and violence to enforce the general policies on the Germans.

Furthermore, the authors challenge the concept of having one national interest. They say that because policies are a result of negotiations between various people, there cannot be a single interest that is more dominant. Just like in researching or understanding political science there is no one absolute truth, similarly there is no one national interest because many people are involved in the decision making process.  

In conclusion, Allison and Halperin present a new idea which says that interaction between states is not the same as interaction between individual because states cannot be reified since it is not rational to assign a state with human attributes. Therefore in order to understand why states act the way they do, the people that comprise the state should be studied.