Advisory Influence in Foreign Policy Decision-Making | Robert Schub

About the Event: Why are some foreign policy advisers more influential than others? A new wave of scholarship illuminates why advisers gain influence generally but says little about which advisers get their way. We argue that foreign policy decision-making can be viewed as a “battle of the advisers” and that individual dispositions and effort give some advisers advantages over others. To test our theory, we introduce an original dataset that systematically codes adviser recommendations across a random sample drawn from over 2,000 foreign policy deliberations with the U.S. president between 1947 and 1988. Our findings show that hawkish advisers enjoy greater influence and that advisers who expend more effort before meetings enjoy greater influence—but that these are non-overlapping sets of individuals. Hawks and hawkish messages win because they garner deference from others, especially conservative leaders inclined to venerate traits associated with hawkishness. Contrary to existing accounts, the findings suggest that more experience or social connections do not grant advisers heightened influence.

About the Speaker: Robert Schub is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. His research addresses international security with an emphasis on (1) the senior officials who make decisions regarding war and peace and (2) the uncertainty they confront when making these decisions. His work studies how the information bureaucracies provide affects the assessments leaders form and how the counsel advisers offer shapes the decisions leaders make. In other work, he studies the individuals who bear the costs of war with a focus on racial dimensions of burden sharing and service-member attitudes toward conflict. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution among other outlets.

He was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and received a PhD in Government from Harvard University.  

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