Rewriting the Rules: Leaders, Bureaucrats, and the Elite Politics of Democratic Foreign Policymaking

Dissertation Project

International relations (IR) scholarship is divided on whether political leaders are capable of curbing bureaucratic parochialism while receiving the information they need to make effective foreign policy decisions. Since bureaucratic elites may leak or otherwise coercively manipulate information to undermine foreign policy decisions they oppose, leaders have powerful incentives to either make bureaucracies more receptive to their choices or reduce their access to information. They may achieve this objective by altering the rules and norms that determine interactions with their diplomatic, military, and intelligence agencies through what this dissertation refers to as leader intervention strategies. Drawing on insights from social psychology and comparative politics, this study puts forward a novel typology of strategies that vary according to two leader-level variables: (1) pre-tenure mistrust for bureaucratic elites; and (2) the degree of public and party-level support a leader maintains. When mistrust is high, leaders are more likely to run a less inclusive foreign policy process, keeping bureaucratic actors out of decisionmaking through an insulation strategy or rendering their efforts to influence policy futile through politicization. When mistrust is low, leaders will only circumvent the bureaucracy when they are politically vulnerable and under pressure to act against the bureaucracy’s wishes. Relying on data from personal memoirs, official documents, and elite interviews, the dissertation uses within-country comparisons of two leaders in India and three in the United States. It also leverages over-time variation in political strength of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Indira Gandhi in India. This dissertation contributes to the IR literature on leaders and other political elites, democratic accountability and foreign policymaking, and the institutional design of national security bureaucracies.