Presidential Decision Making: Rationality, Advisory Systems, and Personality

Scholarship on Presidential Decision Making The scholarship on presidential decision making is broad in scope, deep in quality, and varied in texture. A brief overview of some of the scholarly literature is here divided into decision-making theory, advisory structures, and the analysis of individual presidents. Most of the literature mentioned in this introduction is treated in much more depth in the articles that follow. Decision-Making Theory Much of the decision-making literature after World War II focused on the limitations of the rational model. At first glance, the rational approach to decision making--stating objectives, ranking values, analyzing alternatives, examining consequences, and making choices--seems to accord with common sense (who would want to be irrational?). But the reality of making decisions under conditions of complexity (virtually all public policy decisions) is much more problematic. Much of the scholarly decision-making literature emphasizes just how complex making decisions really is. The rational or deductive model has been analyzed by, among others, Lindblom (1959), Braybrooke and Lindblom (1963), and March (1994) in general and Schelling (1966, 1980) and Snyder (1961) with respect to nuclear deterrence. Much of the literature on rational decision making and its limits was marshaled and summarized by Graham Allison in Essence of Decision (1971; Allison and Zelikow 1999), which analyzed the Cuban Missile Crisis through the lenses of three different models. His Model I lays out the rational approach in general and applies it to analyze the Cuban Missile Crisis. Herbert Simon argued that economists attributed a "preposterously omniscient rationality" (1976, xxvii) to individuals, and he distinguished between "facts" and "values" in organizational decision making (1945). He concluded that organizational decision makers operated within "bounded rationality" and tended to "satisfice because they have not the wits to maximinze" (1976, xxviii, italics in original). He also characterized the context of most governmental decision making: "A decision is not a simple, unitary event, but the product of a complex social process generally extending over a considerable period of time" (1965, 35). Charles Lindblom (1959) attacked the rational decision paradigm by arguing that, in principle, values could not be separated from concrete policies. The informational, resource, and time constraints on decision makers were so substantial that only alternatives marginally different from the status quo could be realistically examined (1959). March and Simon (1958) applied the ideas of satisficing, sequential search processes, and repertoires of actions to decision making in formal organizations and emphasized the cognitive limits on rationality. Cyert and March (1963) challenged the traditional theory of the firm by arguing that firms (and by implication, other complex organizations) did not in fact maximize net revenue or act from perfect knowledge, but rather used organizational slack to make side payments in order to keep together the coalition of subunits in large organizations. Each subunit imposes its own constraints on overall organizational goals. Allison (1971) summarized much of the scholarly literature on decision making, and his critiques of the rational model in his Model II (organizational process) and Model III (bureaucratic politics) have become staples in the political science literature. Advisory Systems Another stream in the scholarly literature that attempts to understand presidential decision making focuses on presidential advisory systems. The assumption is that no one individual can hope to understand all of the ramifications of decisions facing the president and that staff structures are thus necessary but can help or hinder good decision making. Of course, well-organized advisory systems cannot guarantee good decisions. …