April 13, 2022 | Noon to 1:00 PM EDT
Joshua Kertzer (Harvard University)
Join via Zoom or in ISR-Thompson Room 1430
Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision-making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision-making, advisers’ predispositions towards the use of force shape state behavior through participation in deliberations. We test our argument by introducing an original dataset of 2,881 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,073 Cold War-era foreign policy decision-makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness has consistently large effects on foreign policy decisions. Conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. These results enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating that advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate via deliberation, systematically shape foreign policy.