A crisis of governance is widespread in western societies. Public administration is caught in a web of personal and organizational inter-dependencies that require continuous awareness and readjustment on the part of its practitioners. Understanding Policy Fiascoes applies policy analysis to come to terms with policy fiascoes, with a full appreciation of its limits. Despite the fact that policy failures may seem universal, they are in fact better understood as social, political and academic constructions. Bovens and 'tHart trace how and why certain episodes of public policymaking become labeled as "fiascoes." They highlight the analytical and political biases that shape our judgments of policy outcomes and the performance of policymakers and institutions. When put in their proper historical, institutional, and policymaking perspective, many policy fiascoes could easily have turned out quite differently. The authors show that the fact that these policy episodes unfolded as they did does not mean that they were inevitable. Careful analysis indicates that a whole series of variables, if not always manageable, can, through careful configurations of decisions, alter the course and outcomes of policies and programs, as well as the post-hoc judgments made about them. In examining public policymaking, certain questions arise: If public policymaking has failed so miserably, what does this tell us about the state of policy analysis? While policymakers are facing a crisis of legitimacy, policy analysis have been forced to reconsider the validity o their knowledge claims and the extent of their impact on the practice of policymaking. Understanding Policy Fiascoes will provide social scientists, policymakers, and political scientists with compelling perspectives on old problems and a path-breaking way to handle new problems.

DIVEffects of group dynamics on decision making /div

From the New York Times–bestselling author Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions dissects the faults and foibles of recent American foreign policy—explaining why it has been plagued by disasters like the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and outlining what can be done to fix it. In 1992, the United States stood at the pinnacle of world power and Americans were confident that a new era of peace and prosperity was at hand. Twenty-five years later, those hopes have been dashed. Relations with Russia and China have soured, the European Union is wobbling, nationalism and populism are on the rise, and the United States is stuck in costly and pointless wars that have squandered trillions of dollars and undermined its influence around the world. The root of this dismal record, Walt argues, is the American foreign policy establishment’s stubborn commitment to a strategy of “liberal hegemony.” Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to use U.S. power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes. Donald Trump won the presidency promising to end the misguided policies of the foreign policy “Blob” and to pursue a wiser approach. But his erratic and impulsive style of governing, combined with a deeply flawed understanding of world politics, are making a bad situation worse. The best alternative, Walt argues, is a return to the realist strategy of “offshore balancing,” which eschews regime change, nation-building, and other forms of global social engineering. The American people would surely welcome a more restrained foreign policy, one that allowed greater attention to problems here at home. This long-overdue shift will require abandoning the futile quest for liberal hegemony and building a foreign policy establishment with a more realistic view of American power. Clear-eyed, candid, and elegantly written, Stephen M. Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions offers both a compelling diagnosis of America’s recent foreign policy follies and a proven formula for renewed success.

Janis identifies the causes and fateful consequences of groupthink, the process that takes over when decision-making bodies agree for the sake of agreeing to abandon their critical judgment.

Scholars of international relations tend to prefer one model or another in explaining the foreign policy behavior of governments. Steve Yetiv, however, advocates an approach that applies five familiar models: rational actor, cognitive, domestic politics, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics. Drawing on the widest set of primary sources and interviews with key actors to date, he applies each of these models to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis and to the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Probing the strengths and shortcomings of each model in explaining how and why the United States decided to proceed with the Persian Gulf War, he shows that all models (with the exception of the government politics model) contribute in some way to our understanding of the event. No one model provides the best explanation, but when all five are used, a fuller and more complete understanding emerges. In the case of the Gulf War, Yetiv demonstrates the limits of models that presume rational decision-making as well as the crucial importance of using various perspectives. Drawing partly on the Gulf War case, he also develops innovative theories about when groupthink can actually produce a positive outcome and about the conditions under which government politics will likely be avoided. He shows that the best explanations for government behavior ultimately integrate empirical insights yielded from both international and domestic theory, which scholars have often seen as analytically separate. With its use of the Persian Gulf crisis as a teachable case study and coverage of the more recent Iraq war, Explaining Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of foreign policy, international relations, and related fields.