Executive decision-making: challenges, strategies, and resources.

AuthorMoscoe, Adam
PositionReport

Executive branches of government are exercising increased control over decision-making, using a wide range of strategies to develop policy preferences and oversee their implementation. Canada, for instance, has seen a steady presidentialization of its parliamentary system, characterized by a heightened centralization of decision-making in the Prime Minister's Office. The first part of this paper identifies a number of the cognitive biases that impede sound decision-making by the executive and examines two demanding, yet effective, strategies--multiple advocacy and the use of honest brokers -for mitigating subsequent distortions. The second part of the paper discusses challenges to effective policy implementation in light of the systematic disconnections between the executive and the public service. Finally, the merits of political patronage appointments as a means of mitigating these challenges are discussed.

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Executive branches of government are exercising increased control over decision-making, using a wide range of strategies to develop policy preferences and oversee their implementation. Canada, for instance, has seen a steady presidentialization of its parliamentary system, characterized by a heightened centralization of decision-making in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). (1) In a democracy, decisions are not made in a vacuum, and the executive must work to overcome numerous political and institutional challenges in order for decisions to be fully and properly implemented. As decisions are increasingly attributed to a single elected official, it is more important than ever to identify, and develop ways to mitigate, the cognitive biases and distortions that are likely to influence heads of governments by sheer virtue of their human fallibility. Absent some form of intentional intervention, democratic systems do not naturally allow for the exact implementation of executive decisions due to communication breakdowns--familiar to anyone who has ever played a game of 'telephone'--and indirect reporting structures between elected officials and bureaucrats. This paper will address the challenges presented by decision-making biases, particularly with respect to the implementation of executive decisions, and will enumerate potential strategies for resolving these challenges.

Cognitive Biases Impeding Sound Decision-making by the Executive

When complex policy decisions are made by individuals, regardless of the strength of their mandate from the electorate, biases are likely to cloud deliberations and impede logical reasoning. Biases are defined as "cognitive and motivational phenomena that lead individuals to systematically make sub-optimal decisions in terms of their experienced utility." (2) The implications of these suboptimal decisions can be grave, particularly when the domestic agenda is filled, as it typically is, with issues of critical importance to the lives of citizens, such as health, security, and environmental protection.

In addition, the biases that affect a decision-maker are not just internally determined, but are also influenced by multiple stakeholders, who work simultaneously to advance their own interests. Decision-makers must negotiate these often competing agendas. They cannot make a decision that reflects some aggregate or average calculation of these interests, but rather they "must make distributional judgments that promote some people's welfare at the expense of others." (3)

Moreover, unlike weather reporters who make repetitive predictions and receive timely feedback on their precision and reliability, policy-makers must constantly make new decisions in an environment of incomplete information and inconsistent feedback, qualitatively and quantitatively speaking. (4) Decisionmaking occurs on multiple cognitive planes, ranging from a reliance on "intuitive, unconscious, automatic, fast" decision-making to a full engagement of analytic, conscious, and relatively slow decisionmaking. (5) The latter system requires a set of skills, such as statistical analysis, that many decision-makers lack. Cabinet ministers may have at their disposal statistics experts within the public service, but when these experts deliver conflicting, yet, equally valid recommendations, the leader is ill-equipped to decide which recommendation to endorse.

As a result, many leaders resort to intuitive decision-making. This leaves them vulnerable to the following distortions:

* First, the affect heuristic applies when "judgments of risk are often based more on intuition than on dispassionate analysis." (6) President George W. Bush, for instance, referred to himself as a "gut player" who follows his instincts in making decisions. (7)

* Second, leaders may be unwilling to consider divergent opinions or options due to a combination of the following proclivities: (a) overconfidence; (b) motivated skepticism--the tendency not to criticize arguments that support one's existing beliefs; (c) the "gravitational force of prior commitments" made to allies, interest groups, and the like; and (d) the confirmation bias --the tendency to seek information that reaffirms one's beliefs or justifies their preferences. (8)

* Third, leaders may make sub-optimal decisions when presented with too many options. Having too few options can produce similarly poor results. A careful balance is thus required between too many and too few options. (9) In addition, these options must be feasible, and must not be the sort of options that a leader would likely dismiss at first glance due to potential political quagmires or difficulties in 'selling' the policy to constituents in the public sphere. When the United States military presented President Barack Obama with a...

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