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ABSTRACT
Against the predominantly structural explanations of policy fiascos in the public policy literature, this contribution questions whether idiosyncrasies of individual decision-makers should be considered as alternative sources of foreign policy fiascos. The contribution uses the leadership trait approach and the operational code approach from the field of foreign policy analysis (FPA) to discern the personality traits and political beliefs respectively of British prime ministers who ended up with major foreign policy fiascos. The computer-aided content analysis of more than 900 speech acts shows that British ‘fiasco prime ministers’ do indeed exhibit certain ‘extreme’ personality traits (e.g., a considerably higher level of self-confidence) and political beliefs (e.g., a greater inclination to pursue conflictual strategies) that distinguish them from British ‘non-fiasco prime ministers’ and other world leaders. This suggests that the public policy literature might benefit from allowing for a greater role of individual decision-makers in their analyses of policy fiascos.
Notes
1 These approaches have rarely been used in British cases. The most notable exceptions are works by Dyson (2006, 2009; Dyson and Raleigh Citation2012) who, however, did not specifically address the issue of policy fiascos.
2 While Kaarbo and Beasley (Citation2008) discuss ‘extremity’ regarding the impact of coalition cabinets on the substance of a country's foreign policy (with extremity referring to the more conflictual or co-operative behaviour of coalition cabinets compared to single-party cabinets), the idea also seems to provide explanatory leverage in this contribution's discussion on individual decision-makers.
3 A discussion on whether the cases discussed in this contribution actually qualify as ‘policy fiasco' – be it from a rationalistic or an argumentative perspective (Bovens et al. Citation2006: 325–8) – is beyond the scope of this contribution (see the introduction to this collection for details on the respective perspectives). Rather than seeking to establish whether the cases under scrutiny ‘are’ fiascos, the contribution takes corresponding claims in the literature as its point of departure and examines whether the British prime ministers that are commonly associated with fiascos exhibit certain idiosyncrasies that set them apart from prime ministers who are usually not linked to foreign policy fiascos. For literature that classifies the cases under scrutiny as fiascos, see, for instance, Stedman (Citation2011) on appeasement; Gorst and Johnman (Citation1997) on Suez; Ashton (Citation2005) on Macmillan's failed EEC application; Wincott et al. (Citation1999) on ERM; and Coates and Krieger (Citation2009) on Iraq.
4 Since his time in office was less than a year, Alex Douglas-Home (1963–4) was not included.
5 At least 50 spontaneous speech acts containing at least 100 words each should be analysed for each decision-maker. Furthermore, the statements should cover a decision-maker's full tenure, or at least different time periods, and address different subject matters (Hermann Citation2005: 180).
6 A list of the speech acts used in this article is available from the author on request.
7 The exceptions are Neville Chamberlain and Clement Attlee, for each of whom only 50 statements of at least 50 words could be identified.
8 Since the names of the individual leaders comprising the ‘world leaders’ group are not available, it is impossible to discern how many of them are associated with foreign policy fiascos. Besides, the ‘world leaders’ group includes 15, albeit non-specified ‘Anglo-American leaders’ (presumably mainly from the United States and the UK) and thus maybe also a few of the prime ministers analysed in this article. However, their number is too small to significantly bias the mean score of the group. The scores for the ‘world leader’ group are made available when downloading the Profiler Plus programme from the website of Social Science Automation (http://socialscience.net). This article used the version of the table: ‘Leadership Trait Analysis Scores (Means and Standard Deviations)’ as of October 2012.
9 For operational code analysis there is no ‘world leaders’ group available.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Klaus Brummer
Biographical note: Klaus Brummer is associate professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and currently interim full professor of foreign policy and international politics at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.
