Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This article makes use of a unique data set collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important effects of motivated reasoning. In particular, affective biases should cause citizens to take longer processing information incongruent with their existing affect and such biases should also direct search for new information about candidates. Somewhat perversely, motivated reasoners may actually increase their support of a positively evaluated candidate upon learning new negatively evaluated information. Findings are reported that support all of these expectations. Additional analysis shows that these affective biases may easily lead to lower quality decision making, leading to a direct challenge to the notion of ...

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=polisci_pubs

Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making

Acomprehensive understanding of international environmental politics re quires attention to foreign policy. In this essay we describe a wide range of theories and approaches to foreign policy and international relations, with emphasis on how they can help us to better understand foreign policy in the environmental issue area. We organize the theories into three categories: systemic theories, which emphasize the influence of the international system, including the distribution of power within it; societal theories, which focus our attention on domestic politics and culture; and state-centric theories, which find answers to questions about foreign policy within the structure of the state and the individuals who promulgate and implement foreign policies in the name of a given country. Within this presentation of various theories, we highlight the influence of power, interests and ideas.

Environmental Change and Foreign Policy: A Survey of Theory

Despite the potentially important impact of strategy implementation on organizational performance, relatively little has been discovered so far about its antecedents and consequences. This study aims to help fill this gap by exploring the antecedents and consequences of the comprehensiveness of strategic plan implementation. Out of 500 questionnaires, 231 usable ones were collected from United Arab Emirates (UAE) public organizations. We find that our three factors of strategy formulation, namely, adoption of intended mode of strategy, enhancing employees' participation, and minimizing political behavior significantly influence the comprehensiveness of strategic plan implementation, which in turn has a significant positive impact on the effectiveness of strategic planning. We discuss our empirical results, the potential influence of culture, implications for both theory and practice, the limitations of the research and several avenues for future study.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/EMRE_EMRE12068.pdf?abstractid=2805253&mirid=4

An Analysis of the Comprehensive Implementation of Strategic Plans in Emerging Economies: The United Arab Emirates as a Case Study

Evidence-based management (EBM) has been subject to a number of persuasive critiques in recent years. Concerns have been raised that: EBM over-privileges rationality as a basis for decision-making; ‘scientific’ evidence is insufficient and incomplete as a basis for management practice; understanding of how EBM actually plays out in practice is limited; and, although ideas were originally taken from evidence-based medicine, individual-situated expertise has been forgotten in the transfer. To address these concerns, the authors adopted an approach of ‘opening up’ the decision process, the decision-maker and the context (Langley et al. (1995). ‘Opening up decision making: the view from the black stool’, Organization Science, 6, pp. 260–279). The empirical investigation focuses on an EBM decision process involving an operations management problem in a hospital emergency department in Australia. Based on interview and archival research, it describes how an EBM decision process was enacted by a physician manager. It identifies the role of ‘fit’ between the decision-maker and the organizational context in enabling an evidence-based process and develops insights for EBM theory and practice.

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Evidence‐based Management in Practice: Opening up the Decision Process, Decision‐maker and Context

As research on leaders matures, a next step is a better understanding of the advisers who surround them. This article explores the often-hidden politics of leader–adviser interactions, focusing on ...

Joan Hoff Wilson

Papers

Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis@@@The Kennedy Doctrine@@@Khrushchev and Kennedy in Retrospect