Suchergebnisse

When making (foreign)policy, presidents must navigate between twin dangers: excessive conformity and destructive conflict among the policy advocates. The notions of devil's and multiple advocacy are reexamined in light of three decades of research in political science and psychology as coping strategies for dealing with these dangers. Devil's advocacy is of some help in promoting diversisity and mitgating tendencirs toward conformity, despite serious implementation difficulties. A substantial body of conceptual and empirical work bearing on the assessment of the more comprehensive multiple advocacy work has accumulated since its formulation in 1972. The main findings are (I) that practices associated with multiple advocacy have indeed contributed to improving and uncovering avoidable errors, (2) that the implementation of multiple advocacy has been uneven (which makes evaluation difficult), and (3) a number of suggestions for fine‐tuning the prescriptive model and specfing conditions conducive to its effective application.

The problems of internat. political communications are analyzed in terms of the variables contained in 'who says what to, whom through what medium for what purpose under what circumstances and with what effects.' The author stresses the relation between national policy and the politically relevant effects of communication. Special difficulties are: (1) study of political communication requires inter-disciplinary efforts; (2) evaluating effects is complicated because communicator has only vague notion of his purpose; (3) pursual of many goals with many audiences simultaneously; (4) inaccessibility of foreign audience to observation and measurement; (5) lack of clear cut criteria for effectiveness. Communicators are frequently forced to combine criteria of effectiveness with domestic public relations. Communication policy is derived from national policy and its constraints. A major problem is to find ways of controlling audience interpretations of events and actions. Effectiveness is a function of conditions under which communications are sent and received, and the medium through which it is conveyed. An important characteristic of the international audience is their position in the political structure of the nation to which they belong, thus necessitating analysis of the political structure and processes in the nations to which communication is addressed. Each element in the communication process has its own history of development within a given area, which must also be taken into account. R. S. Halpern.