Why are some foreign policy advisers more influential than others? A new wave of scholarship illuminates how advisers gain influence generally but says little about which advisers get their way. We argue hawkish advisers have two built-in advantages in foreign policy decision-making in the United States. First, hawks make recommendations to which presidents are psychologically predisposed to defer and with which peers are inclined to agree. Second, hawks enjoy reputations for reliability, which leads presidents to defer to the recommendations from hawks while rejecting those from doves. To test our model, we leverage big data and machine learning techniques to study the microfoundations of bureaucratic politics, introducing original data that codes 2,021 adviser recommendations and 326 presidential decisions across a random sampling from 2,871 American foreign policy deliberation meetings from 1947 to 1988. The results show that hawks enjoy systematic deliberative advantages – and that experience and coercive influence may confer fewer advantages than previous scholarship suggests.
About the Speaker:
Joshua D. Kertzer is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Government, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research specializes in the intersection of international security, political psychology, foreign policy, and public opinion. He is the author of Resolve in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Abstraction in Experimental Design: Testing the Tradeoffs (Cambridge University Press, 2023), along with articles appearing in a variety of academic journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Foreign Affairs, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. His research has received a range of awards, including the International Studies Association’s Karl Deutsch Award, the International Society of Political Psychology’s Alexander George and Jim Sidanius awards, and the American Political Science Association's Merze Tate and Kenneth N. Waltz awards, among others. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, Global Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Political Psychology, and Princeton University Press’s Princeton Series in Political Behavior. At Harvard, he teaches classes on American foreign policy, international relations theory, and political psychology in international politics, for which he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, Harvard’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
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