Review Article: The Elusive Essence of Decision: A Critical Comparison of Allison's and Snyder's Decision-Making Approaches

Although widely commended as a “path-breaking” and “sophisticated” contribution to the literature on how to study international relations, Allison's Essence of Decision is plagued by inconsistencies and contradictions not unlike those which mar the decisionmaking framework presented by Snyder and his associates almost twenty years earlier. These problems can be summarized usefully in terms of the proverbial tension between “scope” and “objectivity.” The aim of this paper is to illuminate these problems by examining Snyder's and Allison's frameworks in terms of three interrelated categories: (a) their general conceptions of decision makers and decision-making, (b) their research strategies, and (c) the classification systems with which they propose to work.