Strategy Choices of Foreign Policy Decision Makers

Abstract

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.

Information search and mental representation in risky decision making: The advantages first principle

“…Least Probable Negative heuristic (Gallhofer & Saris, 1979): The decision maker identifies the worst outcome for each alternative and chooses the alternative where the worst outcome has the lowest probability.…”

From individual preferences to group decisions in foreign policy decision making: The Dutch Council of Ministers

“…Two of the present authors have made several studies of individual decision making by ministers (Gallhofer et al 1979a(Gallhofer et al , 1989(Gallhofer et al , 1994Saris et al 1984). This study, by contrast, focuses on the process by which the individual preferences of ministers are transformed and aggregated into a group decision within the setting of the council of ministers.…”

Great Power Arms Transfers: Modeling the Decision-Making Processes of Hegemonic, Industrial, and Restrictive Exporters

“…Although in theory the number of these alternatives could be very large, time constraints, lack of information, and other inconveniences usually have the practical effect of limiting the range of options the exporter will entertain. For these reasons and for the sake of simplicity, the common practice of specifying dichotomous decision-making alterna- (Alpert, 1976;Gallhofer and Saris, 1979;Bueno de Mesquita, 1980) is adopted in this study. The multi-criteria model therefore reflects an arms exporter's evaluation of two transfer strategies for a prospective importer during a decisionmaking time period.…”

“…to buttress our security and serve our own interests" (Ferrari, Knopf, and Madrid, 1987:31, emphasis added). Then there are the content analytic inquiries of Holsti (1969), Gallhofer and Saris (1979), and Starr (1984), each of which reveal that toplevel decision makers use fuzzy language-terms such as "good," "bad," "better," "worse," "important," "unimportant"-when judging options, outcomes, and objectives. There is, then, anecdotal and empirical as well as intuitive support for using fuzzy sets to model decision processes.…”