Quiz #2 Flashcards
A model in which decision makers calculate the costs and benefits of each possible course of action, then chose the one with the highest benefits and lowest costs.
Rational Model
A decision making model in which policy making models or policy makers or lower level officials rely largely on standardized responses or standard operating procedures.
Organizational Process Model
A model that sees foreign policy decisions as flowing from a bargaining process among various government agencies that have somewhat divergent interests in the outcome (where you stand depends on where you sit) .
Government Bargaining Model / Bureaucratic Politics Model
The mistaken processing of the available information about a decision; one of several ways - along with affective and cognitive bias- in which individual decision making diverges from the rational model.
Misperceptions and Selective Perceptions
The subconscious or unconscious filters through which people put the information coming in about the world around them.
Information Screening
The rationality of individual cost benefit calculations is undermined by emotions that decision makers feel while thinking about the consequences of their actions.
Affective Bias
Systematic distortions of rational calculations based not on emotional feelings, but simply on the limitations of the human brain in making choices.
Cognitive Bias
Two sides in a conflict maintaining very similar enemy images of each other.
Mirror Image (Form of Cognitive Bias)
Uses them to make decisions by thinking back in history.
Historical Analogies (Form of Cognitive Bias)
Two modifications to the rational model of decision making.
1) Bounded Rationality
2) Prospect Theory
Takes into account the costs of seeking and processing information.
Bounded Rationality
Picking the very best option; contrasts with satisfying or finding a satisfactory but less than best solution to a problem. Decision makers generally satisfied than optimize.
Optimizing
Holds that options are assessed by comparison to a reference point, which is often the status quo but might be some past or expected situation
Prospect Theory
The act of finding a satisfactory or “good enough” solution to a problem.
Satisfying
Frame options available
Editing Phase
Asses options and chose one.
Evaluation Phase
The tendency of groups to validate wrong decisions by becoming overconfident and underestimating risks.
Groupthink
Foreign Policy situations in which outcomes are very important and time frames are compressed.
Crises
Affects the formulation of foreign policy.
Interagency Tensions
Coalitions of people who share a common interest in the outcome of some political issue and who organize themselves to try to influence the outcome.
Interest Groups
Process of talking with legislatures or officials to influence their decisions on some set of levels.
Lobbying
A huge interlocking network of government agencies, industrial corporations, and research institutes, all working together to promote and benefit form military spending.
Military-Industrial Complex
Executives in military industries are often appointed as government officials responsible for military procurement decisions and then return to their companies again.
Revolving Door Process
In IR, the range of views on foreign policy issues held by the citizens of a state.
Public Opinion
Is the minority of the population that stays informed about the international issues.
Attentive Public
