Being Bureaucratic: Social Cognition and Organizational Behavior in Foreign Policy.

In this paper we explore the cognitive and social psychological foundations of bureaucratic politics and organizational behavior as it pertains to foreign policy decision making. Although Allison, Halperin, and others pointed the way toward a fruitful avenue of research in the decision-making tradition, very few studies have moved beyond this classic literature. We argue that by placing "cognition in context," specifically by incorporating insights from the social cognition literature in psychology, the study of bureaucrats and their institutional constraints can bear fruit in foreign policy analysis. Cognitive explanations such as schema theory and analogical reasoning, for example, may also benefit from being placed in a broader institutional context. We illustrate the utility of this cognition-in-context approach by reference to a range of decision-making cases such as Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, September 11th, and the current Iraq war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]