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The question of the presence and role of morality in warfare have traditionally been addressed by theologians, philosophers and ethicists within the just war tradition. These traditional arguments about morality in warfare generally focused only on the views of political leaders and decision-makers. More recently, we have seen the application of just war theory to the empirical study of conflict and international affairs, focusing primarily on legal and procedural questions. Much of this work, however, starts from the implicit assumption that individuals expect there to be a moral component to a state’s decision to use of force. In this paper we address a more fundamental question: does public support and perception of foreign policy actions mirror the expectations of the just war doctrine? Using an experimental design we examine the impact of the in bello constraint of collateral damage and the ad bellum “justness” of military interventions on levels of public support for a foreign policy action and perceptions of the morality of the action itself. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreements among foreign policy makers over the preferred course of action occur frequently. Differing values, experiences, administrative responsibilities and personalities all contribute to the likelihood that members of a policy group will disagree. Those disagreements and the way in which they are addressed influences the group decision. Their decisions often become foreign policy. This experimental study seeks to identify the elements that differentiate when a small group outcome is (a) deadlock, (b) the dominating preference of one person , (c) the preferences of a subset or coalition, or (d) the consensus preference of all. Drawing on theoretical insights from the literature on groupthink, bureaucratic politics and jury decisions, the research hypothesizes the importance of leadership style and group identity as key explanatory variables. The research involves colleges students in a computer-mediated simulation configured in a formal laboratory experiment. The utility of such experimental findings for understanding actual foreign policy making is discussed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most fundamental premises that underlies the study of international relations and comparative politics is that of the choice. Yet the current literature fragments this research into small, unrelated islands, missing linkages and similarities between the choice processes that underlie cooperation and conflict and the decision processes dealing with intrastate and interstate conflicts. While all these islands address or try to define the main ingredients considered when making a choice, and many contain similar assumptions about the processes by which decisions are made, researchers avoid the lonely, and at times daring, swim between islands to enrich their endeavor by learning from others. There are a plethora variables and approaches proposed within the literature to help us understand how states, groups and individuals make such significant choices. We propose that embedding a decision making approach within an experimental paradigm (which we argue is more than a method) can serve as the bridge to enable better communication between islands of research, providing the researcher with an agnostic empirical platform on which to combine and test such elements deductively and rigorously. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy decisions often emerge from small groups whose members frequently must resolve conflicting preferences. Factors that affect the group's management of substantive disagreement among its members can, therefore, influence the collective decision. We propose that both group structural properties (members' identification with the group or with an outside entity) and the elements of process (decision rules) influence a group's decision. As an initial means to search systematically for the hypothesized relationships, we use a group laboratory setting. An experimental methodology (employing a recently developed, computer-based Decision Advisory Forum) enabels us to examine how these factors influence group outputs (deadlock, compromise or an integrative solution) in a controlled environment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]