The Design of Miscalculations: My Review of Tyler Jost's 'Bureaucracies at War'
Many parallels can be drawn about the state of the world today and that in the 19th century. These range from the re-emergence of great power confrontation and drive toward some form of multipolarity to the return of nationalism and protectionism. Likewise, there appears to be an excessive focus on individuals and leaders nowadays.
In China, it is Xi Jinping who has ushered in a new era. Writings in Chinese media often describe his leadership as the core as pivotal to navigate the profound changes unseen in a century that are taking place in the world. In India, Narendra Modi has dominated politics and the news cycle for over a decade. Vladimir Putin has steered Russia for 25 years, while in the US, Donald Trump serves today as a demagogue-in-chief. Each, at different times, has wrapped themselves in the mantle of destiny—whether invoking an omniscient cosmic force or the apparently immutable laws of historical materialism. In essence, the 19th-century Great Man Theory of History is back in vogue, accompanied by growing disdain for bureaucracy and institutional processes.
Yet this leader-centric view obscures the intricate machinery of political decision-making, especially in matters of war and peace. Leaders matter, but they are only as effective as the institutions they build and sustain. This argument lies at the heart of Tyler Jost’s insightful Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation. The book postulates an institutional design theory to understand how and why states miscalculate or succeed in their objectives when initiating or contending with a crisis. This theory is compared to alternate explanations such as the bureaucratic interest group theory, leader-based explanation, and accountability theory.
Jost contends that institutions are critical to understanding why some states are better positioned to manage uncertainty in international affairs than others. The argument is that bureaucracies within a state often operate as “islands of information” and these “gaps require bridges.” This is because access to quality information and competitive deliberations are what eventually yield the best national security outcomes. In making this case, he posits that “national security institutions help explain when and why states miscalculate on the road to war.” However, the choice of national security institutions entails a trade-off. Leaders “can design institutions that ensure they receive the best possible advice or they can design institutions that ensure the bureaucracy is powerless to threaten them” politically.
Jost defines national security institutions as follows:
“National security institutions refer to a comparatively stable and connected set of formal and informal rules that prescribe the roles that bureaucracies play, constrain their actions, and shape their expectations. Institutions do not refer to any single organization, such as a specific bureaucracy or advisory body, but rather the rules that govern how such organizations interact with the leader. If democratic and autocratic institutions are the rules shaping how political leaders are selected for office, national security institutions are the rules shaping how leaders manage the national security bureaucracy.”
The different types of institutions are then plotted on a framework taking into account leader information search capacity and bureaucratic access to information. The former ranges from inclusive to insular, the latter from open to closed. At their intersections emerge four distinct institutional options.
Integrated Institutions: These are characterised by a combination of inclusive information and open bureaucratic access. They reduce risk of miscalculation through competitive dialogue. Integrated institutions hinge on the inclusion of diplomatic, defense, and intelligence bureaucracies in deliberations.
Siloed Institutions: These entail inclusive structures in terms of the availability of information for a leader but limit the bureaucracy’s search capacity. In other words, key national security bureaucracies might have access to the leader but tend to operate in silos, hindering competitive dialogue and scrutiny. One key consequence of this is that “bureaucrats are more likely to provide leaders with information that reflects their parochial interests.”
Fragmented Institutions: These engender systemic vertical and horizontal limitations. Jost argues that such institutions “introduce the possibility of functional failures in information exchange between the bureaucracy and the leader.” In other words, exclusion of certain bureaucracies could limit access to information that is essential to decision-making. The more pernicious effect of fragmented institutions, however, is that they “cause bureaucrats to censor their counsel and manipulate the information that they supply to match the leader’s beliefs. Fragmentation does not simply create barriers to information provision. It also shapes a bureaucrat’s understanding of types of behaviors that the leader deems appropriate and will therefore reward…”
Dictatorial Institutions: These engender a mix of insularity and open bureaucratic access to information. Jost argues that dictatorial institutions tend to achieve outcomes “quite similar to fragmented institutions. Limited search capacity means that leaders should be more likely to miscalculate because they base their decisions on incomplete information. Yet dialogue and information sharing between bureaucracies should have comparatively little effect on the likelihood of miscalculation because higher quality information cannot reach the leader.”
The theory and the case studies that the book provides support the argument that integrated institutions are the most effective in avoiding miscalculation and achieving national security objectives.
Yet, leaders may not necessarily always opt for integrated institutions.
In order to understand why leaders chose a particular type of institution, Jost says that it is important to understand the incentives of political leaders. “Leaders make decisions that maximize the likelihood of remaining in office. Political survival is not determined solely by avoiding miscalculation in international crises. It is also determined by winning political debates about their performance in office,” he argues.
Two key factors are critical to the choice around integration: the political threat that bureaucrats pose and the focus of the leader’s agenda.
“When bureaucrats pose a limited threat to political survival, leaders can adopt integrated institutions regardless of what issues keep them in office. When the level of bureaucratic threat is high, however, how leaders respond depends on the issues that are most important to them. Leaders whose agendas prize domestic issues can choose fragmented institutions to neutralize the threat posed by national security bureaucrats, curbing both their access to the leader’s decision-making and to information in other bureaucratic silos. Leaders whose agenda is instead dominated by international issues choose the middle path of siloed institutions. They accept some political risk of censure via more competent and well-informed bureaucrats in order to get better advice, but restrict the amount of information which the bureaucracy might use to inflict political damage.”
The book tests the theory by leveraging the National Security Institutions Data Set. Subsequently, specific case studies are undertaken, discussing cases from China, India, the US and Pakistan. These are deeply researched and offer really engaging reads. They also allow for testing Jost’s theory across states with different governance systems and cultures, economic and administrative capacities and divergences in national power.
Two of these chapters cover China. The first one discusses China during the Mao years, with a specific focus on the 1962 war with India, the Nationalist Invasion Scare of 1962 and the 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Conflict. The second discusses Chinese decision-making during the war against Vietnam and the 2001 EP-3 incident. These offer detailed application of the institutional design theory across different periods and under different leaders.
Jost argues that in the early years of the PRC Mao Zedong opted for inclusive and open institutions “because the bureaucracy possessed minimal capability and intent to challenge his leadership.” These served China well, as the outcomes of the events of 1962 demonstrated. However, as the political landscape in China shifted heightening Mao’s perception of threat from the bureaucracy, he opted for fragmented institutions, which resulted in incomplete and biased information flow. Mao’s death did not alter this institutional structure, which Jost argues accounts for China’s failure in the 1979 conflict with Vietnam. In the decades that followed, he argues that Chinese leaders opted for siloed institutions, which have served them better comparatively, but still resulted in miscalculations in the specific incident, i.e., the EP-3 case, discussed.
The chapter on India was also particularly of interest to me. It charts India’s journey from a stage where it had fragmented institutions under a dominant leader to developing a siloed set-up before moving towards a more integrated institutional architecture. The role of bureaucratic threat perception from a leader’s perspective in a democracy is really well brought out in this chapter.
Finally, some of my takeaways from the book:
I found the theory that Jost has articulated very compelling. I think the depth of research that he brings forth is truly remarkable. The theory does add a lot to current IR discourse around conflict decision-making, the interplay between leaders and bureaucracies and the importance of understanding how institutional design can impact information flow.
The book also does a great job in juxtaposing the institutional design theory with other alternatives. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of the key arguments and makes the book that much more persuasive. Jost concludes that existing frameworks offer “an incomplete explanation of why states miscalculate and demonstrates that bureaucracy exerts more systematic and less deleterious effects on international politics than the conventional wisdom would suggest.”
Third, information flows and incentives matter, and there can be substantive political costs for information search and access and providing and acquiring higher quality information. It is essential to take into account these incentives and costs for both leaders and bureaucrats when thinking about why states make certain decisions in the foreign policy or national security domain.
Finally, for China analysts, it is important to delineate the changes in foreign and security policy institutional arrangement under Xi Jinping and gather data points about the nature and extent of integration that has taken place. In doing so, one must note that merely the presence of a bureaucracy, such as the Central National Security Commission, does not imply integration. Composition, leadership, diversity and weightage of different bureaucracies and regularity of meetings are important factors. Another point to consider is the threat-level that Xi perceives from the bureaucracy today. What metrics should one use to make this assessment of threat perception? If the book’s argument about the adoption of integrated institutions in the early years of the PRC under Mao are taken into account, then there is no reason why Xi cannot achieve greater integration. Once again, information about the composition of key bodies, meeting schedules and discussion agenda along with reportage on how Xi responds to ideational challenges or counter viewpoints is critical to make such assessments. This, however, is increasingly challenging given the opacity of China’s information ecosystem.