Organizing Mistrust: How Leaders Navigate Bureaucratic Resistance on Foreign Policy

Dissertation Project

Theory

The dissertation addresses an enduring dilemma: foreign policy professionals advise leaders on important decisions, supply them with information and analysis, and manage the day-to-day tasks of countries’ inter-state relations. Yet bureaucrats can also threaten leaders’ political standing by weaponizing information, coordinating coups, resisting policy initiatives, and push for their own selfish priorities. How do leaders shape foreign policymaking institutions, rules, and norms to achieve their policy objectives despite anticipated resistance from diplomatic, military, or defense bureaucracies? What motivates and constrains their organizational choices?

I argue that leaders use organizational strategies – a combination of changes leaders make to foreign policymaking institutions, rules, and norms – to get what they want. Each strategy combines different formal and informal tools to generate varying levels of bureaucratic inclusion in foreign policymaking and loyalty to the leader’s inclinations. Leaders aim to strike a balance between preserving the expertise and autonomy of bureaucratic agencies and retaining control over foreign policy. Those who value control over competence tend to deprioritize bureaucratic inclusion and neutrality. In contrast, those who prioritize competence grant the bureaucracy greater autonomy and include them more in policymaking.  

Drawing on insights from social psychology and administrative politics, I argue that whether leaders prioritize control or competence hinges on their trust in the bureaucracy. Leaders inherently trust or distrust their foreign policy bureaucracy based on a psychological process of social identification and categorization. Distrust is present whenever leaders categorize themselves as part of an “us” in opposition to a “them” within the foreign policy bureaucracy. The degree of distrust shapes how much value leaders see the bureaucracy adding to their foreign policy objectives and heightens the perceived costs of bureaucratic inputs. Ultimately, distrustful leaders are more likely to select strategies that exclude the bureaucracy or encourage its loyalty by purging, coopting, or otherwise reconstituting the bureaucracy. In contrast, trustful leaders will prioritize inclusion and neutrality even when they face bureaucratic opposition to their policy objectives.

An important dimension of my theory centers on leaders’ domestic political strength. Leaders not only have to cope with a foreign policy bureaucracy to implement their foreign policy agenda, but also party leaders, legislators, interest groups, and other centers of power across the political system. The fewer the number of players they have to struggle against to implement their vision, the more resources the leader can afford to expend battling the bureaucracy. This has two counterintuitive implications: the most mistrustful leaders may not ultimately politicize the foreign policy bureaucracy, while the most trustful leaders may not always integrate foreign policymaking if the associated political costs are too high.

Empirics

To illustrate the broad explanatory power of this theory, the dissertation employs a comparative case study design and data from archives and elite interviews in three countries. I show how leaders in India, the United States, and Turkey wield these organizational strategies to reshape the influence of the bureaucracy on foreign policy. In India, I show that Indira Gandhi transitioned from insulation to politicization when she transformed from a reluctant leader with little electoral support to dominant figure in Indian politics. In contrast, I find that Manmohan Singh’s consensus-based foreign policymaking approach was marked by instances of circumvention in politically sensitive issue areas like India’s relations with Pakistan. In the U.S. chapter, I show that Nixon insulated himself from bureaucratic subversion, Carter was forced to exclude the State Department from policymaking at times, and George H.W. Bush ran a largely inclusive and transparent foreign policy process. Finally, I illustrate how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after amassing political power for nearly ten years and growing increasingly suspicious of the secular foreign policy establishment, began to politicize the Turkish foreign policy bureaucracy in the early 2010s.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. When Bureaucracy Meets Power: The Politics of Trust, Exclusion, and Control in Foreign Policymaking (draft available upon request)
3. Distrust in India: Insulation and Politicization under Indira Gandhi
4. Trust in India: Circumvention under Manmohan Singh 
5. Trust and Distrust in America: Nixon, Carter, and Bush the Elder
6. Radical Politicization: Erdoğan versus the Secular Establishment in Turkey
7. Conclusion

Fieldwork Sites

Prime Ministers Museum and Library (New Delhi)

Jimmy Carter Presidential Library (Atlanta)