Decision Making Approaches in International Politics and Research on Japants Foreign Policy

Abstract

The decision-making approach is one of the dominant approaches in the current international politics literature. At the same time, there are many competing decision-making models, and as a result researchers of international affairs give a rather chaotic impression. In order to reduce the chaos, this article proposes to clarify the linkage between foreign policy decision-making models and reality, by two processes.

The first process clarifies the characteristics of existing foreign policy decision-making models around two features of models: their scope based on the functionality of the model, and their explanatory power. As a result, five models (actually eight models) are found in the literature. These models are: intergovernmental politics, interorganizational politics, intragovernmental politics, domestic politics, and transnational politics.

The second process analyzes issues in Japanese diplomatic relations based on three characteristics: the environment of policy actors who decide the policy, the goals and methods for problem solving, and the results of problem solving. It then explores the extent to which the above five models can be applied to diplomatic issues with these three characteristics.

The results of this research may be used as a reference for applying models to the study of Japanese foreign policy.