Organizing Mistrust: How Leaders Navigate Bureaucratic Resistance on Foreign Policy

Dissertation Project

Bureaucratic competencies – technical and regional expertise, specialized skills, information provision, and institutional knowledge and memory – can help leaders skillfully achieve their foreign policy agenda. Yet, as international relations (IR) scholarship has long recognized, foreign policy bureaucracies often push back against or outright sabotage the leaders they serve. How do leaders weigh these possibilities to decide how to incorporate the bureaucracy into their policymaking?

In this dissertation I argue that leaders strategically organize the foreign policymaking process based on how they resolve the conflict between two incentives: the desire to control the direction of foreign policy and the desire to preserve bureaucratic competence. Drawing on insights from social psychology, administrative studies, and comparative politics, this study puts forward a novel typology of organizational 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 political support a leader maintains. Differences over foreign policy vision, partisanship, and other ideological cleavages may exacerbate leader mistrust of the bureaucracy, driving leaders to select organizational strategies that prioritize maintaining control over the bureaucracy. For these leaders, keeping the bureaucracy out of the policy process is not likely to lead to much of a perceived sacrifice. Yet when there is trust, leaders are more likely to resolve the tradeoff in favor of preserving bureaucratic competence, sacrificing some degree of control in so doing.  Leaders will only circumvent the bureaucracy when they are politically vulnerable and under external pressure to act against the bureaucracy’s wishes.

Relying on data from elite interviews and archival documents, 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.