Introduction: Beyond the type of government, the situation at hand, the policy being considered, and the political culture of a particular state, we must also look the variety of foreign policy actors—their powers and interests—if we are to effectively engage in a state-level analysis. Asking who is involved in any state structure is critical to understand policy-making. Click on each of the actors below to find out more information on their role in policy-making at the state-level.

• Heads of Government and Other Political Executives

  President Harry S. Truman once remarked that he possessed foreign and defense policy–making authority that would make "Caesar, Genghis Khan or Napoleon bite his nails with envy" (1). That was an overstatement, but it does highlight the fact that the most important actor in virtually every country's foreign policy process is its head of government (most commonly titled president, prime minister, or premier). A step below, but still of note, are the leader's cast of other political executives, such as ministers of foreign affairs (secretary of state) and ministers of defense (secretary of defense).

  In almost every country, the head of government has important formal powers granted by statutory law or the constitution. Most chief executives, for example, are the commander in chief of their country's armed forces. This gives them broad, often unilateral authority to use the military. Congress passed resolutions supporting President Bush's planned actions against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, but he claimed the right to act without legislative support. Instead, the president claimed the authority to go to war "pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations as commander in chief and chief executive."(2) Such an assertion of unilateral authority dismays many Americans as undemocratic, and it is an issue for you to consider in the decision box, "Who Should Decide on War?" on this chapter's Web site.

  Political executives also frequently possess important informal powers. Their prestige as national leader is often immense, and skillful leaders can use that status to win political support for their policies. This is especially true in world affairs and doubly so in crises where a president is the chief "we" in dealings with "them." Chief executives understand this advantage and use it. "The way to do that," former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once admitted, "is to say politics stops at the seaboard—and anyone who denies that postulate is a son-of-a-bitch or a crook and not a true patriot. Now, if the people will swallow that, then you're off to the races" (3).

• Bureaucracies

  Every state, whatever its strength or type of government, is heavily influenced by its bureaucracy. The dividing line between decision makers and bureaucrats is often hazy, but we can say that bureaucrats are career governmental personnel, as distinguished from those who are political appointees or elected officials.

  Bureaucrats do not always agree with their country's foreign policy. Instead they may favor another policy option based on their general sense of their unit's mission. How any given policy will affect the organization is also an important factor in creating bureaucratic perspective. Often what a given bureaucracy will or will not favor makes intuitive sense. The military of any country will almost certainly oppose arms reductions or defense spending cuts because such policies reduce its resources and influence. But the stereotypical view of the military as always gung ho for war is not accurate (4). Whether the area was Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, or elsewhere, the U.S. military has often been a reluctant warrior within the council of government, especially regarding the use of ground forces. A common view, expressed by then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, is that "politicians start wars. Soldiers fight and die in them." (5) Bureaucrats can influence foreign policy in a number of ways.

  • Filtering information is one way that bureaucracies influence policy. Decision makers depend on staff for information, and what they are told depends on what subordinates choose, consciously or not, to pass on.

  • Recommendations are another source of bureaucratic influence on foreign policy. Bureaucracies are the source of considerable expertise, which they use to push the agency's preferred position. One scholar, after analyzing bureaucratic recommendations in several countries, concluded that leaders often faced an "option funnel." This means that advisers narrow the range of options available to leaders by presenting to them only those options that the adviser's bureaucratic organization favors.

  • Implementation is another powerful bureaucratic tool. There are a variety of ways that bureaucrats can influence policy by the way they carry it out. As the investigations into the 9/11 attacks have proceeded, it has become clear that the terrorists were able to carry them off in part because of flaws in the implementation of U.S. antiterrorist policy. Evidence shows that government agencies often failed to share information or otherwise cooperate, that they discounted the terrorist threat, and that they ignored information that pointed to an impending attack. For example, a congressional report indicates that an FBI agent warned in July 2001 that "an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" were taking flight training. Yet, the report noted, this alert "generated little or no interest" among FBI officials and was not passed on to the CIA or other relevant agencies. The following month the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center warned in a report that "for every [al Qaeda operative] that we stop, an estimated 50 . . . slip through . . . undetected. . . . It is clear that [al Qaeda] is building up a worldwide infrastructure which will allow it] to launch multiple and simultaneous attacks with little or no warning." These and numerous other signals went unheeded, however, leading the congressional committee to conclude that because government agencies "failed to capitalize" on available information.

• Legislatures

  In all countries, the foreign policy role of legislatures is less than that of executive-branch decision makers and bureaucrats. This does not mean that all legislatures are powerless (6). They are not, but their exact influence varies greatly among countries. Legislatures in nondemocratic systems generally rubber-stamp the decisions of the political leadership. China's National People's Congress, for example, does not play a significant role in foreign policy making.

  Legislatures play a larger foreign policy role in democratic countries, but even in these states legislative authority is constrained by many factors. One of these is that chief executives usually have extensive legal powers in the realm of foreign policy. American presidents, for instance, are empowered by the U.S. Constitution to negotiate treaties, to extend diplomatic recognition to other countries, to appoint diplomatic and military personnel, to use U.S. forces as commander in chief, and to take numerous other actions with few or no checks by Congress or the courts.

  Tradition is a second factor that works to the advantage of chief executives in foreign policy making. The leadership has historically run foreign policy in virtually all countries, especially in time of war or other crises.

  Third is the belief that a unified national voice is important to a successful foreign policy. This is particularly true during a crisis, when Congress, just like the public, tends to rally behind the president (7). This emotional response helped win support for a congressional resolution in late 2001 giving the president almost unchecked authority to use military forces against terrorism by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 420 to 1 in the House of Representatives.

  Fourth, legislators tend to focus on domestic policy because, accurately or not, most voters perceive it to be more important than foreign policy and make voting decisions based on this sense of priority. For this reason, legislators are apt to try to influence intermestic policy issues, such as trade, and are apt to be much less concerned with pure foreign policy issues, such as the membership of the NATO alliance.

• Interest Groups

  Interest Groups are private associations of people who have similar policy views and who pressure the government to adopt those views as policy. Traditionally, interest groups were generally considered to be less active and influential on foreign policy than on domestic policy issues. The increasingly intermestic nature of policy is changing that, and interest groups are becoming a more important part of the foreign policy– making process. We can see this by looking at several types of interest groups.

  Cultural groups are one type. Many countries have ethnic, racial, religious, or other cultural groups that have emotional or political ties to another country. For instance, as a country made up mostly of immigrants, the United States is populated by many who maintain a level of identification with their African, Cuban, Irish, Mexican, Polish, and other heritages and who are active on behalf of policies that favor their ancestral homes (8). Religious groups are one type of cultural group that exercises influence in many countries. Conservative Protestant groups, for one, are influential in the administration of President George W. Bush because of his personal religious convictions and the important political support he receives from them. Economic groups are another prominent form of interest activity. As international trade increases, both sales overseas and competition from other countries are vital matters to many companies, their workers, and the communities in which they live. Issue-oriented groups make up another category of interest group. Groups of this type are not based on any narrow socioeconomic category such as ethnicity or economics. Instead they draw their membership from people who have a common policy goal. The concerns of issue-oriented groups run the gamut from the very general to the specific and from liberal to conservative. Just one of the multitude of groups, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, is an organization that during the later Clinton years included in its membership such soon-to-be Bush administration appointees as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. It was this neoconservative (neocon) group that was the driving force behind the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war and its use in Iraq (9).

  Transnational interest groups also deserve mention. Growing interdependence has increased the frequency of countries, international organizations, and private interest groups lobbying across borders. In 2004, there were 823 foreign interest groups registered with the U.S. government. Other national governments are not required to register, and they lobby through their diplomats. But subnational units such as the Province of Quebec in Canada were registered. So too were some hoping to become national governments, including Tibet's exiled Dalai Lama, the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq, and the Palestinian Authority.

• The People

  Like legislatures, the public plays a highly variable role in foreign policy. Public opinion is a marginal factor in authoritarian governments. In democracies, the role of the people is more complex (10). On occasion, public opinion plays a key role. The United States got out of Vietnam in the 1970s in significant part because of the determined opposition of many Americans to continued involvement in that war. Yet even in democracies, the public usually plays only a limited role in determining foreign policy.

  One reason for the public's limited role is that few citizens ordinarily pay much attention to international issues. During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, terrorism and Iraq were prominent issues. That was unusual, though. Normally, the public's political interest focuses on domestic issues.

  This is not to say that all of the public pays little heed to foreign policy all of the time. First, there is a segment of the public, the "attentive public," that regularly pays attention to world events. Second, crisis issues, such as the war with Iraq, and inter-mestic issues, such as trade, are apt to draw significantly greater public attention. Third, studies show that although the public is not versed in the details of policies, its basic instincts are neither disconnected from events nor unstable (11).

  There are a few countries in which the public occasionally gets to decide a foreign policy issue directly through a national referendum (12). However, all democracies are basically republican forms of government in which policies and laws are made by elected officials and their appointees. Therefore, it is more common for public opinion to have an indirect democratic influence on policy through voting for officials and through the sensitivity of those officials to public attitudes.

  Even if they cannot usually decide policy directly, voters do sometimes have a choice of candidates for national leadership positions who have different foreign policy goals and priorities (13). The change of Spain's prime ministers from conservative José Maria Aznar to liberal José Luis Rodríguez-Zapatero in 2004 distinctly changed that country's policy toward keeping its troops in Iraq, and it is probable that the foreign policy of a President John Kerry would have differed in important ways from that of President George Bush.

  Additionally, research shows that both elected and appointed officials are concerned with public opinion and that it often influences policy (14). One reason is that most decision makers in a democracy believe that public opinion is a legitimate factor that should be considered when determining which policy is to be adopted. Second, leaders also believe that policy is more apt to be successful if it is backed by public opinion. Third, decision makers are wary of public retribution in the next election if they ignore majority opinion.

References:

(1) Rossiter, Clinton. 1960. The American Presidency, 2^nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

(2) "Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate," October 9, 2001, State Department Web site at http://www.state.gov.

(3) Rourke, John T. 1983. Congress and the Presidency in U.S. Foreign Policy Making: A Study of Interaction and Influence, 1945-1982. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

(4) Gelpi, Christopher, and Peter D. Feaver. 2002. "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick? Veterans in the Political Elite and the American Use of Force." American Political Science Review, 96: 779-793.

(5) New York Times, September 17, 1995.

(6) Howell, William G. and Jon C. Peehouse. 2005. "Presidents, Congress, and the Use of Force." International Organization. 59(1): 209-232.

(7) Baker, William D. and John R. O'Neal 2001. "Patriotism or Opinion Leadership? The Nature and Origins of the 'Rally 'round the Flag' Effect." Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45: 661-688.

(8) Saideman, Stephen M. 2001. The Ties that Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy, and International Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press.

(9) Benn, David Wedgwood. 2004. "Neo-Conservatives and Their American Critics." International Affairs, 80/5:963-969.

(10) Everts, Philip, and Pierangelo Isernia, eds. 2001. Public Opinion and the Use of Force. London: Routledge.

(11) Witko, Christopher. 2003. "Cold War Belligerence and U.S. Public Opinion Toward Defense Spending." American Politics Research, 31: 379-392.

(12) Dalton, Russell J., Wilhelm Burklin, and Andrew Drummond. 2001. "Public Opinion and Direct Democracy." Data Journal of Democracy, 12/4: 141-154.

(13) Fordham, Benjamin O. 2002. "Domestic Politics, International Pressure, and the Allocation of American Cold War Military Spending." Journal of Politics, 64: 63-89.

(14) Burstein, Paul. 2003. "The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda." Political Research Quarterly, 56: 29-40.

Additional references:

Scott, James M. and Ralph G. Carter. 2002. "Acting on the Hill: Congressional Assertiveness in U.S. Foreign Policy." Congress & the Presidency, 29: 151-170.

Leogrande, William M. 2002. "Tug of War: How Real Is the Rivalry between Congress and the President over Foreign Policy?" Congress & the Presidency, 29: 113-118.

Henry, Charles P., ed. 2000. Foreign Policy and the Black (Inter)National Interest. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Isernia, Peirangelo, Zoltan Juhasz, and Hans Rattinger. 2002. "Foreign Policy and the Rational Public in Comparative Perspective." Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46: 201-225.

Heith, Diane J. 2003. "One for All: Using Focus Groups and Opinion Polls in the George H. W. Bush White House." Congress & the Presidency, 30: 81-94.

Reiter, Dan, and Erik R. Tillman. 2002. "Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict." Journal of Politics, 64: 810-837.