How and why do people make political decisions? This book is the first to present a unified framework of the Behavioral Political Science paradigm. – BPS presents a range of psychological approaches to understanding political decision-making. The integration of these approaches with Rational Choice Theory provides students with a comprehensible paradigm for understanding current political events around the world. Presented in nontechnical language and enlivened with a wealth of real-world ...

Why do presidents and their advisors often make sub-optimal decisions on military intervention, escalation, de-escalation, and termination of conflicts?The leading concept of group dynamics, groupthink, offers one explanation: policy-making groups make sub-optimal decisions due to their desire for conformity and uniformity over dissent, leading to a failure to consider other relevant possibilities. But presidential advisory groups are often fragmented and divisive. This bo...

"A compelling case for transforming how research methods are taught to undergraduate students of political science." — London School of Economics Review of BooksEach year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important con...

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures.In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Ira...

The philosopher Cristina Bicchieri here develops her theory of social norms, most recently explained in her 2006 volume The Grammar of Society. Bicchieri challenges many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. She argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Bicchieri's theory accounts for these automatic components of behavior, where indiv...

Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making presents a psychological approach to foreign policy decision making. This approach focuses on the decision process, dynamics, and outcome. The book includes a wealth of extended real-world case studies and examples that are woven into the text. The cases and examples, which are written in an accessible style, include decisions made by leaders of the United States, Israel, New Zealand, Cuba, Iceland, United Kingdom, and others. In addition to cov...

The military expert and author of Leadership presents "the most thoughtful analysis yet of America's recent conflicts—and future challenges" (Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal).Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in America's favor, capacity-building efforts, and tactical victories, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory...

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves ...

In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats.You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

One of the gravest issues facing the global community today is the threat of nuclear war. As a growing number of nations gain nuclear capabilities, the odds of nuclear conflict increase. Yet nuclear deterrence strategies remain rooted in Cold War models that do not take into account regional conflict. Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments offers an innovative theory of brokered bargaining to better understand and solve regional crises. As the world has moved away from the binati...

This book presents a series of essays by I. William Zartman outlining the evolution of the key concepts required for the study of negotiation and conflict management, such as formula, ripeness, pre-negotiation, mediation, power, process, intractability, escalation, and order.Responding to a lack of useful conceptualization for the analysis of international negotiation, Zartman has developed an analytical framework and specific concepts that can serve as a basis for both study and p...