How Do Leaders Make Decisions?

Understanding how leaders make foreign policy andnational security decisions is ofparamount importance for the policy community and academia. Yet on their own,neither rational nor cognitive schools of decision-making analysis offer totallyconvincing results, and in any case, rigorous decision analysis methodologiesare rarely, if ever, applied to the decisions of world leaders.

How Do Leaders MakeDecisions?: Evidence from the East and West, Part B,the second in a two-part volume covering a total of ten world leaders, fills thisgap by using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method to explore how figuressuch as Putin, Erdogan, Khaled Mashal, Mao, and Saddam Hussein make or made majordecisions of international significance. By analysing the decisions made by keypolitical figures around the world, past and present, the chapters gatheredhere shed light on how they are reached and what policy implications they havefor their own and other nations. The analyses are based on traditional andcontemporary theories of foreign policy decision making, including, but notlimited to, the rational actor model, the cybernetic theory of decision,poliheuristic theory, and various decision rules, including the elimination-by-aspectrule and the lexicographic decision rule. Cumulatively, what these chaptersuncover is that foreign and nationalsecurity policies can be best explained by tracing the cognitive processleaders go through in formulating and arriving at their decisions.

For itsgroundbreakingly rigorous methodology and its unprecedented scope, this bookand its companion book are essential reading for students, scholars, andpolicymakers alike.