48 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
signifi cant claim generated by these studies was that government decisions were
products of bargaining and negotiation among interested political actors. As
these studies focused on the executive branch, the central player in these bar-
gaining frameworks was the president. Th e president, however, was argued to
have little unilateral decisionmaking power; he had to accommodate the inter-
ests of the various institutional factions in the executive branch. Bureaucracies
and bureaucrats, in short, played high-level politics, and usually played the game
very well.
Th ese studies were discursive rather than explicitly theoretical, but the par-
allels between them and the contemporary work on game theory—a highly for-
malized and mathematical approach to explaining behavior—are unmistakable.
Th e loose bargaining framework adopted by this research quickly proved a use-
ful way to organize empirical research and produced many of the raw materials
for a more comprehensive theory. Th e best-known studies of this early bureau-
cratic politics literature include Samuel Huntington’s Th e Common Defense
(1961), Warner Schilling’s 1962 essay on the politics of national defense, and,
most famously, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power (1960). Bureaucracies and
executive branch offi cials were not portrayed here as neutral agents of imple-
mentation, but as active participants in determining the will of the state. Th ese
studies steadily built a case for a general theory of bureaucratic politics centered
on bargaining games in the executive branch.
Th e fi rst serious comprehensive attempt to produce such a framework was
undertaken by Graham Allison in his book Essence of Decision (1971), and fur-
ther refi ned by Allison and Morton Halperin (1972). Allison’s immediate focus
in Essence of Decision was explaining why the governments of the United States
and the Soviet Union did what they did during the Cuban missile crisis. With a
nuclear exchange at stake, these were policies of particular importance, but Alli-
son was aiming well beyond the confi nes of one case study. Essentially, he posed
a broad question that cut to the heart of bureaucratic politics: Why do govern-
ments do what they do? In other words, how is policy made, and who determines
or infl uences it? To provide general answers to these questions, Allison articu-
lated three theoretical models.
Th e fi rst was the rational actor model (what Allison termed “Model I,” or the
classical model). Model I proposes that government decisions can be understood
by viewing them as the product of a single actor in strategic pursuit of his own
self-interest. Th e second model is the organizational process paradigm, or Model
II, which argues that numerous actors are involved in decisionmaking, and de-
cisionmaking processes are highly structured through standard operating pro-
cedures (SOPs). When a problem occurs, Model I assumes that the government
will identify the potential responses to that problem, assesses the consequences of
those actions, and choose the action that maximizes benefi ts and minimizes costs.
In contrast, Model II assumes that the government will rely on organizational
routines instead of a rational cost-benefi t calculus to make that decision. Rather