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The assessment of the selection of strategy is studied using documents of a specific case of Dutch foreign policy from the beginning of World War I. First, a content analysis procedure was developed in order to search for the relevant concepts in the documents and to represent the argumentations in decision trees. Thereafter, the applicability of several decision critena to the data is discussed. In order to describe the data, an alternative decision rule had to be developed, one which can be considered an adaptation of Simon's satisficing principle.

Abstract. This article describes the process of the aggregation of individual ministerial preferences into group decisions in a national cabinet, on the basis of a sample of crucial Dutch foreign policy decisions as described in the minutes of the council of ministers. The results of the study show that decisions in the cabinet were mainly made according to the norms of this group, which were consensus and the non‐interference of ministers in issues not concerning their department. Consensus turned out to be of secondary importance as compared with noninterference; key ministers could push through decisions by majority rule if they had consensus among themselves. Since specialists mostly made the decisions, the task of non‐specialist ministers was mainly to function as approvers or disapprovers, though they did make some minor contributions in cases of disagreement among the specialists. When there was agreement among the specialists they followed a process resembling the analytic model, i. e. one based on consideration of the consequences. However, when there was disagreement between specialists, they engaged in a cybernetic decision process, reviewing sequentially a large number of options, neglecting the consequences and striving for a consensus option such as incremental action, which would frequently be the result of a compromise.