CHAPTER OUTLINE I. Foreign Policy Elites: Individuals Who Matter • Liberals and constructivists recognize that leaders do make a difference. Whenever there is a leadership change in a major power, speculation always arises about possible changes in the country's foreign policy, which may affect international relations. • Constructivists also argue that policy shifts in the Soviet Union were caused not only by Gorbachev but also by the networks of reformists and international affairs specialists who promoted new ideas. • For realists, individuals are of little importance. States are not differentiated by their government types or the personalities of their leaders, but by the relative power they hold in the international system. • The impact of elites: external conditions o When political institutions are unstable, young, in crisis, or collapsed, leaders are able to provide powerful influences. o Individuals affect the course of events when they have few institutional constraints, such as in dictatorial regimes. o Decision makers' personal characteristics have more influence on outcomes when the issue is peripheral rather than central, when the issue is not routine, or when the situation is ambiguous. • The impact of elites: the personality factor o The personality characteristics that affect foreign policy behaviors include: nationalism, perception of control, need for power, need for affiliation, conceptual complexity, and distrust of others.

1. Leaders with high levels of nationalism, a strong need for power, low conceptual complexity, and a high level of distrust of others tend to develop an independent orientation to foreign affairs.

2. Leaders with low levels of nationalism, a high need for evaluation, high conceptual complexity, and a low level of distrust of others tend toward a participatory orientation in foreign affairs. o Personality characteristics affect the leadership of dictators more than that of democratic leaders because of the absence of effective institutional checks on dictators. • Individual decision making o Individuals are not perfectly rational decision makers. The individual selects, organizes, and evaluates incoming (incomplete) information about the surrounding world. o In perceiving and interpreting new and oftentimes contradictory information, individuals rely on existing perceptions based on prior experience. o Political scientists have conducted a number of empirical mindset studies of those elite individuals who left behind extensive written records. Since few leaders leave such a record, our ability to reconstruct elite images and perceptions is limited, as is our ability to state their influence on a specific decision. • Information-processing mechanisms o Individual elites utilize, usually unconsciously, a number of psychological mechanisms to process the information that forms their general perceptions of the world:  Individuals strive for cognitive consistency, ensuring that their beliefs fit into a coherent whole.  Elites in power look for those details of a present episode that look like a past one, perhaps ignoring important differences. Such similar details are referred to as an evoked set.  Perceptions are often shaped in terms of mirror images: while considering one's own action good, moral, and just, the enemy is automatically found to be evil, immoral, and unjust. o Small groups also have a psychologically based dynamic that undermines the rational model. The psychologist Irving Janis called this dynamic groupthink. The dynamics of the group include:

3. The illusion of invulnerability and unanimity

4. Excessive optimism

5. Belief in the group’s own morality and the enemy's evil

6. Pressure placed on dissenters to change their views o Small groups have additional distorting tendencies, such as the pressure for group conformity and “satisficing.” II. Private Individuals • Less bound by the rules of the game or by institutional norms, private individuals engage in activities in which official representatives are either unable or unwilling to participate. • Private individuals increasingly play a role in track-two diplomacy. Track-two diplomacy utilizes individuals outside of governments to carry out the task of conflict resolution, such as former president Jimmy Carter’s role in negotiating Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia. o However, the role of such private individuals can lead to confusion about whom they actually speak for. o Other types of two-track diplomacy involve the lengthier process of sustained dialog (Northern Ireland) or private individuals who can play a linkage role between countries (Armand Hammer). • The cases of Mohamed Bouazizi, A. Q. Khan, and Aung San Suu Kyi o Mohamed Bouazizi was the Tunisian vendor whose self-immolation was the impetus for the Arab Spring. o A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani scientist, confessed to selling nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, thereby enabling nuclear proliferation. o Aung San Suu Kyi was the face of the opposition movement to the repressive military government of Myanmar. o Alternative critical and postmodern approaches attempt to draw mainstream theorists' attention to these other stories. Feminist writers have sought to bring attention to the role of private individuals and especially women. III. Mass Publics • Mass publics have the same psychological tendencies as elite individuals and small groups. They think in terms of perceptions and images, they see mirror images, and they use similar information-processing strategies. • Elites and masses: common traits o Some scholars argue that there are psychological and biological traits common to every man, woman, and child, and that societies reflect those characteristics. o For example, individuals and masses are said to have an innate drive to gain, protect, and defend territory—the "territorial imperative." Both also share the frustration-aggression syndrome: when societies, or individuals, become frustrated, they become aggressive. o The problem with the territorial imperative and frustration-aggression syndrome is that even if all individuals and societies share these innate predispositions, not all leaders and all peoples act on them. o Another possibility is that elites and masses share common traits differentiated by gender. However, the research on gender is sketchy, because it does not answer the question of whether these differences are rooted in biology or learned from culture. • The impact of public opinion on elites o Publics do have general foreign policy orientations and specific attitudes that can be revealed by public-opinion polls. o More often than not, however, publics do not express one dominant mood; top leaders are usually confronted with an array of public attitudes. o Occasionally, the masses may vote directly on an issue with foreign policy significance. o Evidence from the United States suggests that elites do care about the preferences of the public, although they do not always directly incorporate those attitudes into policy decisions. Presidents care about their popularity, but mass attitudes may not always be directly translated into policy. • Mass actions and the role of elites o At times, the masses, essentially leaderless, take collective actions that have significant effects on the course of world politics. Individuals act to improve their own political and economic welfare. For example, the exodus of East Germans through Austria led to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. o At other times, a small elite may have acted behind the scenes or even organized mass protests, such as during the "people's putsch" (Bulldozer Revolution) of October 2000 in Serbia, which served as the blueprint for subsequent uprisings in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. o Elites were also behind the scenes in Iran’s green protests and in the Arab Spring. o The long-term impact of those revolutions where the masses played a role with elite support remains in doubt.