Session 8 - Bureaucratic Politics Model.

Allison and Halperin in their article provide us with a lens to understand foreign relations and the relations between different states. Who makes the decisions, whether they are individual actors or whether it’s the state itself and what influences their decision making? These are the questions that arise in our minds and the authors by the help of a “game” make us understand foreign policy and decision making. For me this week’s reading was even more exciting, because I have always wondered who makes the final decision, when we talk about let’s say Pakistan and India almost getting engaged in a war, is it the entire population of a country who wants the war or are they few top notch influential people in the state who make the final decision? With the help of the Bureaucratic Politics Model, a lot of things were revealed to me.

The game talks about senior and junior players. As the name suggests, the senior players are those who dominate in the international arena and junior players follow the seniors and implement their decisions. A more practical example could be when we take the US as a senior player presently in the international arena and countries such as Pakistan can be the junior players. With negotiations and interests being measured, a lot of decisions are made.

What we can still wonder is what leads to certain decisions being made. Does the atmosphere in the international state system affect decision making at the state level? Would people put the domestic problems at the back burner to focus on more international arena? Would policies be made based on how other states are acting? It all comes down to a zero sum game, one person’s gain is another ones loss and vice versa. An irony I’d like to point out is that even though decisions are called state decisions, but in reality, it is the views and beliefs of a few individuals working together who make decisions for the state. Decisions are made to seem as if they are decisions of the state, but in reality they are decisions of people. Even though the Bureaucratic Politics Model helps us understand the decision making pattern but it has its strength and weaknesses, it is made to seem to be too simplistic, but the real application can be quite complex when we want to predict the behaviors of the states when it comes to their foreign policy.