Decision by Design: Leaders, Bureaucracies, and International Crisis Performance

Abstract When do leaders initiate international crises in which they fail to achieve their goals? I argue that poor crisis performance is more likely when a state’s bureaucracy provides incomplete or inaccurate information to leaders. Two characteristics of a state’s national security institutions—capacity for information search and interbureaucratic information sharing—shape the quality of information provision. Leaders are thus less likely to initiate international crises that fail to advance their goals when they sit atop institutions that ease transaction costs of relaying information to leaders and that allow bureaucracies to competitively evaluate each other’s information. To test my argument, I leverage data measuring bureaucratic institutions across the globe from 1946 to 2015. The analysis finds that crisis performance depends on institutional design, suggesting that some leaders are more prone that others to exhibit poor judgment in high-stakes international crises because of institutional constraints on their information. A case study on China’s decision-making prior to the Sino-Vietnamese War illustrates the theory’s mechanisms. Collectively, the theory and findings improve our understanding of how bureaucracy shapes international conflict.