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A substantial portion of public policy is created, implemented, and adjudicated through small groups of elective and appointive officials occupying various institutional roles in the United States. A thorough understanding of the decision-making process is crucial if we are to comprehend policy-making and resultant policy outcomes. Small group decision-making bodies characterize local, state, and national political systems in both domestic and foreign policy arenas. Yet the small group process and the social-psychological mechanisms influencing individual and collective choice resulting from that process are consideiably under-investigated in the examination of policy systems.Our purpose is to explicate a theoretical framework which specifically addresses microanalytic components of the process of political decisionmaking. Although an extensive and critical review of the epistemological, practical, and theoretical problems of decision-making and the literature relevant to them has already been addressed in some detail elsewhere (Kirkpatrick, 1975a;1975c), our approach to decision-making is guided by a number of general assumptions. These include the premise that social-psychological concepts used in political science have enjoyed little at FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIV on June 11, 2015 abs.sagepub.com Downloaded from