Prof. Dr. Dr.h.c.mult. Reinhard
Meyers, WWU Münster
• Bounded Rationality and
Constructed Realities: Main
Developments in Decision-Making
Theory from the 1950s to today
• Version 2.0
This file can be downloaded from
my website
• http://reinhardmeyers.uni-muenster.de
There you can also find further material
to accompany our seminars on
International Theory and International
Politics
Lost in the maze ??? Send email to
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Only until July 31st, 2014 !!
Recommended Reading
• David Kinsella/Bruce Russett/Harvey Starr:
World Politics. The Menu for Choice. 10th
internat.ed., Wadsworth 2013, Ch. 6, pp 129 –
155
• Charles W. Kegley, Jr./Shannon L. Blanton:
World Politics. Trend and Transformation,
2012 – 2013 ed., Wadsworth 2012, Ch. 3, pp
52 - 82
Why look at theory ?
Premiss I: knowledge of reality depends
on our perception of it
• Our knowledge of reality is once removed
from reality.
• Social, political – and also academic or
scientific – behavior cannot be understood
as an immediate reflex reaction in an actual
situation.
• Rather, it is formed by the perception of a
real situation and by the interpretation, i.e.
the image, we have of a particular situation –
independent of whether the actual situation
is in reality formed in the same way as we
see and interpret it (Thomas Theorem).
Premiss II: all knowledge is theory-laden
•
•
•
•
Our knowledge of reality is always
theory-laden.
Theory is "the net which we throw out
in order to catch the world – to rationalize, explain, and dominate it.“
Different theories = different nets =
different realities
Karl Popper. Logik der Forschung, 1935: p.26
(The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London:
Hutchinson, 1959)
Decision Making
„The process of evaluating and choosing
among alternative courses of action.“
„The process of selecting an option for
implementation.“
Decisions are formed by:
1. a decision maker (the one who makes the
final choice) and
2. a decision unit (all those in a small group,
organization, or government who are
involved in the process).
Decision Making (2)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Decision makers react to:
an identified problem or set of problems
by analysing information,
determining objectives,
formulating options,
evaluating the options, and
reaching a conclusion.
Decision Making (3)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Decisions are affected by:
the nature of the problem
the external setting
the internal dynamics of the decision unit
the personality of the decision maker(s)
speed of events and developments in the
external setting producing stress and
leading to incomplete information
Decision making
• A mental process resulting in the selection of a course of
action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision
making process produces a final choice.The output can be an
action or a mental representation of choice.
Explaining decision-makers' behavior (I):
Answers from the Social Psychology of I.R.
 Herbert C. Kelman (Ed.): International Behavior. A SocialPsychological Analysis (1965)
•
Premiss:
"...environmental factors become related to the
attitudes and decisions which comprise a states'
foreign policy only by being perceived and taken
into account in the policy-forming process. The
statesman's psychological environment (that is,
his image, or estimate, of the situation, setting, or milieu)
may or may not correspond to the operational
environment (in which his decisions are executed). But
in policy-making, as we have stressed before, what
matters is how the policymaker imagines the milieu to
be, not how it actually is."
(Harold + Magaret Sprout: Environmental Factors in the Study of
International Politics, JCR 1957)
Psychological Environment
Operational
Environment
Belief System:
Images of the past,
the present, and the
future ("facts")
-------------------------
Perception
of
"Reality"
Decision
Images of what
should be ("Norms
and values")
ACTION
Operational
= Information
Change
Environment
Recommended Reading
• Robert Axelrod (ed.): Structure of
Decision. The Cognitive Maps of
Political Elites. Princeton: Princeton
UP 1976
• THE classic: Richard C. Snyder &
H.W.Bruck & Burton Sapin (eds.):
Foreign Policy Decision-Making. An
Approach to the Study of International
Politics. Glencoe: Free Press 1962
Explaining decision-makers' behaviour
(II): Answers from Behaviouralism
Premiss:
Only observable phenomena are
susceptible to scientific analysis; the aim
of science is a logically inter-related
system of value-free statements of facts,
hypotheses and causal laws allowing for
the explanation and prediction of
behaviour in if - then terms.
• Herbert A.Simon (1947): Administrative Behavior: A
Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative
Organizations, - 4th ed. New York 1997, The Free Press
Stimulus – Response – Scheme
(Operationa)
Environment
Mental
Process
black box
(Operational)
Environment
not open to
analysis
Stimulus
Response
observable phenomena
Explanations of behaviour take rationalist
models as their starting point
Self-interested actors behaving rationally
• maximize their utility
• correctly anticipate the results of their action
• are subject to outside constraints.
Actors' preferences and causal beliefs are
given;
attention focuses an the variations of outside
constraints and their effects
Examples:
Ideas,
Norms,
Values are
unimportant
or epiphenomenal
Structural Functionalism, Systems Theory, Rational
Choice Approaches
The Rational Actor model of decisionmaking
• This model provides an idealised view of
how actors make decisions:
• Once a stimulus is received from the
envoironment, actors clarify their goals,
evaluate their options and determine their
preferences, and then make a decision.
• „Rationality“ refers to the instrumental
process of decision-making, NOT to the
goals or preferences that actors adopt or to
their projections of success.
Different views on Rationality
• Rational behavior is purposive behavior – so
instrumental rationality is an ability to relate means
to ends.
• One view of rationality assumes that decisionmakers possess all relevant, i.e. perfect information,
which is used to determine the course of action that
maximizes benefits relative to costs.
• The other view points to the difficulties inherent in
digesting massive amounts of information –
information overload leads to a screening out of
information, and forces decision-makers to decide
what to decide.
Foreign policy decisions – like all others
• ,,,are rarely made by people having all
the facts… policy makers have
„ ... to act in the fog of incomplete
knowledge without the information that
will be available later to the analyst…“
Henry Kissinger
Bounded rationality
idea that in decision making, rationality of individuals
is limited by the information they have, the cognitive
limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of
time they have to make decisions
proposed by Herbert Simon as an alternative basis for
the mathematical modeling of decision making, as e.g.
used in economics; it complements rationality as
optimization, which views decision making as a fully
rational process of finding an optimal choice given the
information available
Another way to look at bounded rationality is that,
because decision-makers lack the ability and
resources to arrive at the optimal solution, they
instead apply their rationality only after having greatly
simplified the choices available. Thus the decisionmaker is a satisficer, one seeking a satisfactory
solution rather than the optimal one
Rationality Paradox
• Information overload forces decisionmakers to focus their attention on
some problems, situations, crises to
the detriment of others.
• The paradox: in order to confront
policy problems rationally, decisionmakers must distort their view of the
real world – a deviation from the
rational decision-making model…
Incrementalism
Incrementalism, also called disjointed incrementalism,
is a policy making process which produces decisions
only marginally different from past practice.
Some analysts describe incrementalism as muddling
through, in contrast to the ideal of the rationalcomprehensive model of policy planning. The rational
model assumes a great deal of information, clarity of
goals and criteria, and the ability to define and analyze
all possible alternatives, rendering a single clear
solution. The real world is not so obliging.
David Braybrooke/Charles E.Lindblom: A Strategy of
Decision. Policy Evaluation as a Social Process. New
York 1970, Free Press
Explaining decision-makers' behaviour:
(IIIa) Post-Behavioural Perspectives
General characteristic:
Shift from explanation to understanding
explanation: generally presumed to deal with causes
causes generally presumed to be external to
the actor whose behaviour is to be explained
social world, like the rest of the natural world
to which it belongs, is an external environment (of the actor / actors), independent from
individual perception and to some extent
predictable
understandinq: generally presumed to deal with meaning
meaninq can only be understood from „within"
social world is a (linguistic) construction consisting of a
set of rules and meanings structuring social /individual
perception
Thomas-Theorem: „If men define situations as real, they are real
in their consequences“
Interpretive-Constructive Paradigm
Explaining decision-makers' behaviour
(IIIb) The Social Construction of Reality
[or better: the construction of reality by means of
language symbols]
Premiss: Social „reality" is only susceptible to our
perception / cognition as constructed reality
„Realities" are the outcome of social bargaining
processes — i.e. complex interactions resulting from
a) fights for / of the most situation-adequate, fitting, or
(only) winning interpretation of a phenomenon or a
situation
b) formulation of consensus over jointly shared
knowledge
[knowledge: constructs, i.e. a set of abstractions,
generalisations, formalisations, and idealisations which
structures social perception]
Explaining Decision-Makers‘ Behavior
(IIIc): elements & research areas
• Small-group interaction – pressures to conformity –
group think: illusion of own invulnerability vs.
stereotyped views of the opponent
• Irving L. Janis: Groupthink. 2nd ed. Boston 1982
• Individual perceptions and beliefs – images of the
enemy – setup of idiosyncratic belief systems
• Robert Jervis: Perception and Misperception in
International Politics. Princeton, N.J.1976
• Personal Character and Human physiology
• Harvey Starr: Henry Kissinger: Perceptions of
International Politics, Lexington 1984
Cognitive Dissonance
• Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by
holding conflicting cognitions(ideas, beliefs, values,
emotions, reactions) simultaneously. In a state of
dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt,
anger, or embarrassment.
• Assumption: people have a motivational drive to
reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions,
adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or
alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of
the dissonant elements.
• Leon Festinger: A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
Stanford 1957
Cognitive Dissonance (2)
• Cognitive dissonance theory warns that people have
a bias to seek consonance among their cognitions.
According to Festinger, we engage in a process he
calls "dissonance reduction", which could be
achieved in one of three ways:
• lowering the importance of one of the discordant
factors,
• adding consonant elements,
• or changing one of the dissonant factors.
• Alternatively, the possible consequences of dissonance to your belief system can be overcome by
simply ignoring incoming new information…
PERSPECTIVES ON
DECISION MAKING
The Rational Actor Model
Decisions are made
by a rational actor responding
THE RATIONAL ACTOR MODEL
purposively to an external challenge. The actor is
assumed to hold clear objectives, to assess carefully
the costs and benefits of each option, to pick the best
option fulfilling his objectives, and to fully implement
that choice.
Variant: the decision maker is assumed to select the
first satisfactory option rather than to search until the
optimal solution is found („strategy of satisficing“).
THE ORGANISATIONAL
PROCESS MODEL
Emphasizes the impact of routines on decisions by
organizations, shows how organizational structures and
routines shape choices by limiting the information available
about a problem, the menu of options for responding, and the
implementation of whatever is chosen. Pre-planned routines
are necessary in order to coordinate the behaviour of larger
numbers of people in an organization. Routines influence the
style and content of decision making: being interested in
continuity, organisations tend to fall for an incremental
adaptation strategy rather than for bold individual changes.
THE BUREAUCRATIC
POLITICS MODEL
Decisions result from political struggles in a bureaucracy. Bargaining among
individuals with different interests, status, and power can lead to an eventual
compromise originally preferred by none of the parties („suboptimal solution“).
Decisions are influenced by
► the number of actors involved
► their prestige, responsibilities, values and expertise
► the impact of public opinion, pressure groups, and the media
► individual needs for cognitive consistency (cf. theory of cognitive dissonance)
► group pressure for conformity
► misperception and miscalculation.
Decision making on one issue is also influenced by the presence of competing
problems that distract attention, increase uncertainty, and make the process both
more complex and psychologically more demanding.
Recommended Reading
Graham Allison/Philip Zelikow; Essence
of Decision. Explaining the Cuban
Missile Crisis. 2nd ed. New York 1999:
Longman [originally 1963, Pb. 1970]
Decision Making as a Two-Level Game
Assumption:
Decision making under interdependence; complex patterns of interdependence do not only
constrain statesmen, but they also open up new possibilities for creative statecraft
Starting Point:
Statesmen are typically trying to do two things at once: they seek to manipulate domestic and
international politics simultaneously.
Diplomatic strategies are constrained both by what other states will accept and by what
domestic constituencies will ratify. Diplomacy is a process of strategic interaction in which actors
simultaneosly try to take account of and influence the expected reactions of other actors, both at
home and abroad.
The outcome of international negotiations may depend on the strategy a statesman chooses
to influence his own and his counterpart’s domestic polities. By exploiting control over
information, resources, and agenda-setting in his own polity, the statesman can open up new
possibilities and options for international bargaining.
Conversely, international strategies can be employed to change the character of domestic
constraints, to create a policy option that was previously beyond domestic control, or to target
policies directly at domestic groups in foreign countries („transnational politics“), who could be
turned into allies „behind the back“ of the statesman’s international negotiation partners.
Concept of Double-Edged Diplomacy
Cf.Peter B.Evans et al.(eds.): Double-Edged Diplomacy. International Bargaining and Domestic Politics. Berkeley:U.of
California Press 1993
DECISION-MAKING AS A TWO LEVEL GAME
ASSUMPTION
Decision making under interdependence; complex patterns of interdependence do not
only constrain statesmen, but they also open up new possibilities for creative statecraft
STARTING POINT
Statesmen are typically trying to do two things at once: they seek to manipulate domestic
and international politics simultaneously.
Diplomatic strategies are constrained both by what other states will accept and by what
domestic constituencies will ratify. Diplomacy is a process of strategic interaction in
which actors simultaneosly try to take account of and influence the expected reactions of
other actors, both at home and abroad.
The outcome of international negotiations may depend on the strategy a statesman
chooses to influence his own and his counterpart’s domestic polities. By exploiting control
over information, resources, and agenda-setting in his own polity, the statesman can open
up new possibilities and options for international bargaining.
Conversely, international strategies can be employed to change the character of domestic
constraints, to create a policy option that was previously beyond domestic control, or to
target policies directly at domestic groups in foreign countries („transnational politics“),
who could be turned into allies „behind the back“ of the statesman’s international
negotiation partners.
CONCEPT OF DOUBLE-EDGED DIPLOMACY
Cf.Peter B.Evans et al.(eds.): Double-Edged Diplomacy. International
Bargaining and Domestic Politics. Berkeley:U.of California Press 1993
Looking at Decision Making from a Recent
International Relations Perspective
For some time already, the analysis of International Relations is characterised by a change in
perspective
 away from the state as a unitary actor acting as a gatekeeper between the domestic and
international policy areas
 up, down, and sideways to supra-state, sub-state, and non-state actors.
From the society of states, our focus of attention has consequently shifted to transnational and
transgovernmental societies which take the form of boundary-crossing networks amongst individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
rule of the
technocrats ?
In effect, much of
decision- making
occurs informally
within such policy
networks.
This poses problems:
democracy and accountability
deficit in international politics
loading of decisionmaking processes in
order to favour some
options over others
multi-level governance approaches
to international politics
efforts to catch the real existing
complexity
of its policy processes
decision-making approaches
to international politics
efforts to catch the process-ness or procedural characteristics of
policy processes
multi-level structure
resulting actual policies
actors’ input:
aims, interests, resources
policy-making
processes
What is governance?
• The term "governance" is a very versatile one. It is
used in connection with several contemporary social
sciences, especially economics and political
science.
• It originates from the need of economics (as regards
corporate governance) and political science (as
regards State governance) for an all-embracing
concept capable of conveying diverse meanings not
covered by the traditional term "government".
• Referring to the exercise of power overall, the term
"governance", in both corporate and State contexts,
embraces action by executive bodies, assemblies
(e.g. national parliaments) and judicial bodies (e.g.
national courts and tribunals).
• The term "governance" corresponds to the so-called
post-modern form of economic and political
organisations.
What is Governance II
• According to the political scientist Roderick Rhodes,
the concept of governance is currently used in
contemporary social sciences with at least six
different meanings: the minimal State, corporate
governance, new public management, good
governance, social-cybernetic systems and selforganised networks 1.
• 1) R. Rhodes, “The new governance: governing without
government” (1996), in Political Studies, Vol. 44, page 652.
Multi-Level Governance
Flexibly organised common problem solving among different communities from
the local via the regional and state to the international level (and vice versa)
In International Relations:
Concept covers the mechanisms,
agreements, and patterns necessary to insure, in an anarchical
international system
* transnational cooperation
* balances (of power/influence)
* stability
without formalised and institutionalised organisations and
treaty systems
governance without government
In Domestic Politics:
Concept gains importance in
contexts in which political
institutions and their decisionmakers lose part of their autonomy
to act; political direction and
problem solving has to rely
on cooperation of political AND
societal actors in networks and
negotiation systems (Round Tables
etc.)
MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE:
Supranational and
intergovernmental
actors
International level
MAIN ACTORS AND LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
GOVERNMENT A
TARGET STATE
GOVERNMENT B
GOVERNMENT C
State level
Administration
Legislative branch
Judiciary system
Central state
Regional level
Administration
Legislative branch
Judiciary system
Regional/substate unit
Individual level
International
regimes
Individual cognition;
Belief system;
Personal and national identity
Transnational
groups
Domestic groups &
issue-specific groups
(commercial, religious,
and environmental)
Agenda setting and decision-making:
A procedural basis for interventionists or a case of the
blind leading the lame ?