Revising the Bureaucratic Politics Model.

This paper aims at enhancing the explanatory power of the Bureaucratic Politics Model (BPM). It commences with a brief outline of the model's three core propositions (stand-sit proposition, bargaining proposition, resultants proposition). The paper moves on to discuss the BPM's major deficiencies. They relate to a lack of clarity concerning the formation of the actors' policy preferences and a limited specification of the conditions under which unintended compromise solutions, that is, resultants, occur. The paper puts forward suggestions as to how to overcome those shortcomings. Concerning the formation of the actors' policy preferences, the paper argues that the BPM's stand-sit proposition could be integrated into the framework of poliheuristic theory in the form of a "noncompensatory bureaucratic loss aversion variable." This variable leads to the elimination of options that are unacceptable for the actor's organization. As to resultants, the paper specifies the conditions under which results are more likely than resultants. However, the paper argues those conditions seldom materialize. Therefore, resultants are the likely outcomes of bargaining processes among bureaucratic actors with diverging policy preferences and different power potentials. Future research might want to systematically account for the impact of domestic (e.g., coalition governments) and international (e.g., multilateral security institutions) constraints on the decision-making processes along the lines of the revised BPM. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]