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，以至于人们很容易怀疑领导人如何做出明智的决定。一个领导者的决策怎么能不被必然伴随着如此多的个人和机构观点的低效率和利己主义所玷污呢？更重要的是，当这样的权威政府结构处理外交政策和发动战争的决定的重要事项时，会发生什么？虽然关于外交政策和战争的学术文献数量庞大，但其中大部分都忽略了一个重要问题，即领导人在外交政策危机期间如何做出决策，当他们有这些复杂的，有时是自私的咨询和官僚结构帮助指导政策时。这个项目填补了这个学科如何理解国内政治和战争之间的联系的重要空白。为了做到这一点，该项目呼吁的文学“原则”或领导人谁必须作出权威性的决定委托咨询和信息收集任务的顾问或“代理人”，以减少他们的决策负担。与此相关的问题是监测代理的行为和他/她的动机，以逃避分配的任务和/或提供自我利益的建议。此外，委托结构的复杂性可能导致向领导者提供的信息和建议的扭曲和丢失。这个项目研究了这对领导者在危机中做出的决策有什么影响。使用多方法的方法，包括正式建立理论论点，并使用大n统计测试和受控实验室实验来测试其影响，研究表明，当一个国家的咨询结构允许这些问题自由渗透时，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，这些领导人更容易犯外交政策错误，比如在不应该打仗的时候打仗，在应该打仗的时候不打仗。因此，这项研究旨在提供一个额外的国内政治为基础的解释，为什么利益追求，成本最小化的领导人发现自己卷入了不受欢迎的，长期和昂贵的冲突。更广泛地说，这项研究促进了我们对不确定性下风险和代价高昂的决策的理解，这不仅是政治学家的问题，也是其他学者的问题。此外，理论上的论点可以很容易地适应解释不对称的内部和国家间的conflictions.The论点指向特定的国内机构的有效性，在减少与委托代理人的咨询任务，并允许领导人作出更明智的决定相关的问题。因此，这项研究为政策制定者和制度设计者提供了有价值的线索，以了解哪些制度更有助于成功的外交政策。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，以减少监控的需要以及代理人故意操纵建议和信息和/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.