Elite Decision Making Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Elite decision making refers to those choices made by the intellectual, educational, and political elites in a given society. Various models of elite decision making exist. Most such models emphasize the individual level of analysis because attention remains focused on how and why particular leaders make the choices they do. However, some models of elite decision making also focus on group decision making among elites. The most prominent of these group-based models has been groupthink.

Theories concerning elite decision making have focused on both personality and situational explanations for behavior. These theories can be applied in either domestic or foreign policy contexts, although it has traditionally been more common to apply elite decision making models in foreign policy domains because American leaders typically have more freedom of action in this area. In domestic political arenas, explanations for elite decision making often contrast with models designed to explain mass public opinion.

Theories of elite decision making that focus on personality historically took the form of psychobiography, or the attempt to explain a particular leader’s political actions in light of his or her personal drives and needs. This tradition, begun by Harold Lasswell, was further developed by many others including James David Barber, Fred Greenstein, and Alexander George. This approach often, but not always, drew on psychoanalytic theory to examine the relationship between childhood experiences, personal history, and political outcome. Other incarnations of this work include models that purport to locate political behavior in particular personality traits, whether those traits revolve around risk taking, authoritarianism, or some other relevant trait. Early theories of the authoritarian personality developed by Adorno and colleagues, for example, reported relationships between anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and political and economic conservatism. Although this work came under methodological criticism, it was widely applied to both elites and individuals in mass publics. Recent versions focus on right-wing authoritarianism. In one particularly prominent variant of the personality model, David Winter drew on earlier work by David McClelland and others to investigate how leaders’ particular motives and drives affected their performance and appeal.

Some work on personality has focused on the impact and importance of emotional motives and feelings in influencing decision making. Early work in this area stressed the ways in which emotion could bias decision making in detrimental ways. Certainly, the groupthink paradigm provides an example of a model wherein too much emotional attachment between people can lead to premature consensus without appropriate analysis or sufficient criticism. However, more recent work indicates that emotion often can provide an effective and efficient basis on which to make fast and largely accurate decisions. Most likely, the relationship between emotion and performance follows the familiar inverted u-shaped function: too much gets in the way, while too little impairs functionality as well.

Some approaches to elite decision making also attempt to take into account the particular historical circumstances and demographic background of leaders. This kind of analysis focuses on how elites are influenced by, and reflect, their particular social, ethnic, religious, political, or class backgrounds. The goal in this work is to explore the relationship between these forces and later political behavior.

Some models of elite decision making focus on the situational and environmental determinants of choice. In this regard, prospect theory provides a preeminent model of decision making under conditions of risk. In this paradigm, environmental factors structure the choices that elites and other individuals make when confronted by risky prospects. Many other models drawn from psychology, behavioral economics, and decision theory can be applied to elite decision making as well.

Many models of elite decision making are criticized for similar reasons. In particular, such models come under scrutiny for their failure to take sufficient account of other factors judged to exert a greater influence on political outcomes than personality, such as political incentive structures, large-scale social and political forces, and other historical and institutional pressures. One of the most important rebuttals to such arguments rests in the obvious impact that particularly powerful leaders have had on their times, both for good and for ill. Charismatic leaders retain the capacity to shape the events of their time, and such effects are hard to examine outside of a framework of individual models of elite decision making and choice.

Bibliography:

Barber, James David. The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. 4th ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 2008.
George, Alexander. Presidential Decision Making in Foreign Policy. Boulder, Colo.:Westview, 1980.
Greenstein, Fred. The Presidential Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Lasswell, Harold. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
McClelland, David. The Achieving Society. New York: Free Press, 1999.