tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3113886515630609301.post7221090656610573626..comments2023-07-27T10:24:58.450+02:00Comments on Lesesaal-e: G. Allison/ P. Zelikow: Essence of Decision (1999)Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07829542278838681612noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3113886515630609301.post-2869288763131106002010-09-03T00:20:52.803+02:002010-09-03T00:20:52.803+02:00Hallo.
Ich mochte mit Ihrer Website lesesaal.blogs...Hallo.<br />Ich mochte mit Ihrer Website lesesaal.blogspot.com Links tauschenAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3113886515630609301.post-19230015613760700862007-05-31T13:21:00.000+02:002007-05-31T13:21:00.000+02:00Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow's Essence of Dec...Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow's Essence of Decision is an updated version of Allison's 1969 article, "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis," which arguably was a watershed in the study of international politics. For those who are not avid enthusiasts of the Cuban Missile Crisis (admittedly, like Christian, I'm not), it might be unapparent why one should care about Allison's work. After all, the jargons and labels abound, and for someone who is not a student of international politics, why should one be invested in how "neorealists," "neoliberals," "organizational theorists," or "rational choice modelers" theorize about political outcomes? <BR/><BR/>I would argue that there is good reason why Allison's book has sold more than a quarter of a million copies and is read by academics and policy-makers alike. In particular, I think Allison's call to examine the actual processes of how decision-making via his organizational processes and government politics models is driven by an awareness of the important political, ethical, and theoretical stakes involved in how we conceptualize and understand politics. <BR/><BR/>First of all, Allison's work, largely a reaction to the predominance of rational choice and the primacy of economic theorizing as the basis of studying international politics, highlights the problematic tendency for rational choice 'explanations' to devolve into backwards induction instead of true explanation; that is, rational models often end up asking what the goals and objectives of agents would have been in order for the outcome to be rational. Allison provocatively asks: "does a statement of reasons why a rational actor would choose an action constitute an explanation of the occurrence of that action" (1969, p716)? The answer is clearly no. And if reasons for actions are not causal explanations, then the rational expectation of the lack of nuclear war due to mutually assured destruction or deterrence is fundamentally untenable (even if logically coherent). If decisions are not actually made according to the premises of rational choice theorizing, then it could be dangerously misleading to adopt rational models as conceptual frameworks for understanding the most vital issues of international politics. What is at stake for Allison is the human cost of a possible nuclear war or the fatal mismanagement of crises, outcomes that seem to be outside of the realm of possibility in rational choice models. It is only by looking at actual decision-making processes, which may be influenced and constrained by arbitrary standard operating procedures and bureaucratic in-fighting, that we come to understand the precariousness and luck involved in generating political outcomes. Allison's greater ambition is to illuminate the contingencies and dangers of international political interactions, which are masked when one views "rational choice" and "state as a unitary actor" as ontological claims rather than simplifying assumptions.<BR/><BR/>Second, aside from illustrating the dangers involved in presuming rational choice theories to be an accurate explanation of decision-making, Allison's work also begs the question of how actual decision-making comports with our normative aspirations for a democratic polity. If Allison is right that decisions are often "outputs" of standard operating procedures or "outcomes" of bargaining games among actors seeking to advance their own parochial self-interest, what does this imply about democratic possibilities? <BR/><BR/>Third, Allison raises an epistemological challenge at the level of theory: what, exactly, is an explanation? What does it mean to explain an occurrence or a decision? As noted above, the organizational processes and government politics models are in large part a critique of rational choice models as insufficient 'explanations'. Allison suggests that explanation implies prediction (1969, p689), since to explain that event B occurred because of cause A implies that the presence of A will lead to B. Yet it is unclear that Allison's two models can live up to this standard and are any less ad hoc or post hoc than rational choice theories. Indeed, Allison's fiercest critics (from mainstream international relations scholarship) argue that his two models simply offer a fuller story, a better description at most, but not much theoretical progress. David Welch's 1998 assessment of bureaucratic models is telling: <BR/>"What Can We Know about Bureaucratic Politics and State Behavior? At the moment, we know virtually nothing. As a technique in the study of individual policy decisions, bureaucratic politics has enriched our historical understanding considerably. But in the absence of carefully designed studies testing rigorously deduced expectations from logically coherent theories, there are no general propositions in which we can have confidence that relate bureaucratic factors to state action or that compare the relative explanatory power of bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic factors" (p. 216).<BR/>While I wouldn't necessarily endorse Welch's criteria for judging the fruitfulness of theories (most of the IR literature fails to live up to these standards), I think his indictment of bureaucratic models beckons us to go back to the theoretical problems that Allison highlighted in 1969 but never sufficiently resolved himself: What is an explanation, how does it differ from description, and in the realm of the social sciences, what can we reasonably hope for from theory? There are no easy answers here, but anyone who thinks there is a difference between social science and the humanities is forced to address these issues.<BR/><BR/>Ultimately, I think Allison's most significant contribution is his attention to the crucial linkages between the conceptual models we use, their normative underpinnings, and the implications that flow from them. Theoretical lenses always presuppose a set of normative judgments regarding what factors are significant and what variables are causally efficacious. Theories are maps of the world, and as such, they provide a depiction of the political landscape and suggestions for how to navigate the terrain. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to argue that different maps produce different worlds.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com