How Do Leaders Make Decisions?

Understanding how leaders make foreign policy and
national security decisions is of
paramount importance for the policy community and academia. Yet on their own,
neither rational nor cognitive schools of decision-making analysis offer totally
convincing results, and in any case, rigorous decision analysis methodologies
are rarely, if ever, applied to the decisions of world leaders.
How Do Leaders Make
Decisions?: Evidence from the East and West, Part B,
the second in a two-part volume covering a total of ten world leaders, fills this
gap by using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method to explore how figures
such as Putin, Erdogan, Khaled Mashal, Mao, and Saddam Hussein make or made major
decisions of international significance. By analysing the decisions made by key
political figures around the world, past and present, the chapters gathered
here shed light on how they are reached and what policy implications they have
for their own and other nations. The analyses are based on traditional and
contemporary theories of foreign policy decision making, including, but not
limited to, the rational actor model, the cybernetic theory of decision,
poliheuristic theory, and various decision rules, including the elimination-by-aspect
rule and the lexicographic decision rule. Cumulatively, what these chapters
uncover is that foreign and national
security policies can be best explained by tracing the cognitive process
leaders go through in formulating and arriving at their decisions.


For its
groundbreakingly rigorous methodology and its unprecedented scope, this book
and its companion book are essential reading for students, scholars, and
policymakers alike.