Government decisions emerge from organizational processes and bargaining among players.
Allison applied all three models to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1971, showing the rational-actor account explained least. Soviet missile sites were built to standard Soviet templates, making them trivially identifiable from the air — an organisational routine, not a choice.
In practice
- A regulator's response to a crisis is not what any official decided but what the existing inspection template could produce in three weeks.
- A company's "strategic pivot" turns out to be whichever option the finance team's model could evaluate before the board meeting.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works