Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Know Then Thyself, Domestic Delegation, Information, Leadership Uncertainty and Decisions during Crisis Bargaining

政府是由官僚、官员、非正式和任命的顾问组成的复杂网络，在许多情况下如此复杂，以至于人们很容易想知道领导人是如何做出明智的决定的。领导者的决策如何不会受到效率低下和利己主义的影响，而这些都必须伴随着如此多的个人和机构观点？更重要的是，当如此笨重的政府结构处理外交政策和发动战争的决定等重要问题时，会发生什么？尽管关于外交政策和战争的学术文献很多，但其中很大一部分忽略了一个重要问题：当领导人在外交政策危机期间做出决策时，他们有这些复杂的、有时是自私自利的咨询和官僚结构来帮助指导政策。这个项目填补了该学科如何理解国内政治和战争之间的联系的这一重要空白。为了做到这一点，该项目呼吁有关必须做出权威性决定的“原则”或领导者如何以及为什么将咨询和信息收集任务委托给顾问或“代理人”的文献，以减轻他们的决策负担。与此相关的是监控代理人的行为和他/她逃避所分配任务和/或提供利己主义建议的动机的问题。此外，授权结构的复杂性可能会导致向领导人提供的信息和建议的扭曲和丢失。这个项目考察了这对领导者在危机期间做出的决策有什么影响(如果有的话)。这项研究使用了多种方法，包括正式构建理论论点，并使用大n统计检验和受控实验室实验来检验其影响。研究表明，当一个国家的咨询结构允许此类问题自由渗透时，领导人倾向于对战争成本做出不知情和不准确的评估。因此，这些领导人更有可能犯下外交政策错误，比如在不该打仗的时候打仗，在应该打仗的时候不打仗。因此，这项研究试图提供另一个基于国内政治的解释，解释为什么追求利益、成本最小化的领导人发现自己卷入了不受欢迎的、长期的和代价高昂的冲突。更广泛地说，这项研究加深了我们对不确定情况下高风险和高成本决策的理解，这不仅是政治学家的担忧，也是其他学者的担忧。此外，这一理论论点可以很容易地用来解释不对称的国家内部和国家间冲突。这一论点指向了特定国内机构在减少将咨询任务委托给代理人并允许领导人做出更明智的决策方面的有效性。因此，这项研究为政策制定者和机构设计者提供了宝贵的线索，让他们知道哪些机构更能为成功的外交政策做出贡献。对于领导者来说，这项研究展示了他们可以管理和组织现有机构、顾问和官僚的方法，以减少对监测的需要，以及他们的代理人故意操纵咨询和信息和/或逃避任务的需要。

Governments are complex webs of bureaucrats, officials, informal and appointed advisers, so complicated in many cases that one can easily wonder how leaders make informed decisions. How are a leader's decisions not tainted by the inefficiencies and self-interest that must accompany so many individual and institutional viewpoints? More importantly, what happens when such ponderous government structures deal with important matters of foreign policy and decisions to wage war?While the scholarly literature on foreign policy and war is vast, much of it has neglected the important question of how leaders make decisions during foreign policy crises, when they have these complex, sometimes self-interested advisory and bureaucratic structures helping guide policy. This project fills in this important gap on how the discipline understands the link between domestic politics and war. To do so, the project appeals to the literature on how and why "principles" or leaders who have to make authoritative decisions delegate advisory and information gathering tasks to advisors or "agents" in order to reduce their decision-making burden. Associated with this are problems of monitoring the agent's behavior and his/her motivation to shirk from the assigned task and/ or provide self-interested advice. In addition, the complexity of the delegatory structure can lend itself to the distortion and loss of information and advice being presented to the leader. This project examines what effect, if any, this has on the decisions that a leader makes during crises. Using a multi-method approach, that includes formally building the theoretical argument and testing its implications using large-n statistical testing and a controlled laboratory experiment, the study shows that when advisory structures in a state allow such problems to infiltrate freely, leaders are predisposed to making uninformed and inaccurate assessments of the costs of war. Such leaders are therefore more likely to make foreign policy mistakes, such as fighting when they should not, and not fighting when they should. As such, the study seeks to provide an additional domestic-politics based explanation of why benefit seeking, cost minimizing leaders find themselves involved in undesirable, long and costly conflicts. More broadly, the study advances our understanding of risky and costly decision-making under uncertainty, a concern not only of political scientists, but also of other academics. Additionally, the theoretical argument can be easily adapted to explain asymmetric intra- and interstate conflicts.The argument points towards the effectiveness of specific domestic institutions in reducing problems associated with delegating advisory tasks to agents and allowing leaders to make better informed decisions. This research therefore provides valuable clues to policy makers and institutional designers as to what institutions are better in contributing to successful foreign policies. For leaders, the research demonstrates ways in which they can manage and organize their existing institutions and advisers and bureaucrats, in a manner that reduces the need for monitoring and their agents' need to willfully manipulate advice and information and/or shirk from their tasks.