Foreign Policymaking and Group Dynamics: Where We've Been and Where We're Going

Research on foreign policymaking has focused on the policy process and the organizational context around policy decisions to explain foreign policy behavior. This research tradition includes multiple theories and a wide variety of methodologies; it demonstrates complex relationships among foreign policy factors, and it links its scholarly research to practical policy concerns (see, for example, Neack, Hey, and Haney 1995; Hudson 2002). This essay focuses on one piece of this diverse picture—the study of decision groups—as a means of bridging the individual and organizational levels of analysis. In complex foreign policy cases involving uncertainty, political controversy, and conflicting values, members of decision groups (like the US president's inner circle) become central to the judgment process by defining the nature of the problem and presenting appropriate options for discussion. The more than thirty years of scholarship examining group dynamics provide us with a strong basis on which to determine...