Author Meets Critics: Tyler Jost's "Bureaucracies at War"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Why do states start conflicts they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge Studies in International Relations series; Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political. This roundtable brings together scholars from across the fields of international relations theory and foreign policy decision-making to debate the role that bureaucratic institutions play in shaping international politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Chairs

• Tyler C. Jost Brown University

• Jack L. Snyder Columbia University

Presenters

• Dale Copeland University of Virginia

• Fiona Cunningham University of Pennsylvania

• Alexandre Debs Yale University

• Roseanne McManus Pennsylvania State University

• Rachel Maureen Myrick Duke University

• Paul Staniland University of Chicago