Advisory Influence in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Speaker: Robert Schub
Why are some foreign policy advisers more influential than others? A new wave of scholarship illuminates why advisers gain influence generally but says little about which advisers get their way. We argue that foreign policy decision-making can be viewed as a “battle of the advisers” and that individual dispositions and effort give some advisers advantages over others. To test our theory, we introduce an original dataset that systematically codes adviser recommendations across a random sample drawn from over 2,000 foreign policy deliberations with the U.S. president between 1947 and 1988. Our findings show that hawkish advisers enjoy greater influence and that advisers who expend more effort before meetings enjoy greater influence-but that these are non-overlapping sets of individuals. Hawks and hawkish messages win because they garner deference from others, especially conservative leaders inclined to venerate traits associated with hawkishness. Contrary to existing accounts, the findings suggest that more experience or social connections do not grant advisers heightened influence.