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How do decision-makers know what they know? Analysis of a recent survey of decision-makers in the executive and legislative branches of government in both the United States and Britain reveals that decision-makers increasingly rely upon external sources of information, including the commercial media, interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and academics for the information they use in foreign policy-making. This evidence provides confirmation of the current conventional wisdom in academic literature, newspapers, and policy papers that government bureaucracies are no longer able to compete with the information and activities of non-governmental organizations. As a result, I argue that theories of foreign policy-making need to be re-examined in order to account for two crucial developments of the 21st century: the information technology revolution and globalization. I present ideas about how and why a standard of foreign policy analysis, the bureaucratic politics model, should and could be adjusted to account for the empirical findings of the decision-maker survey. I then look to networking theories from sociology to understand the recent buzz about the advantages of networks compared to hierarchies when it comes to information collection, processing, and transmission. Network theories explain why non-governmental information sources are surpassing governmental information. I find networks have two chief information advantages which link the results of my decision-maker survey and the conventional wisdom regarding the new power of non-governmental actors. Networks enable non-governmental actors to acquire new information and provide access to decision-makers to communicate this information while simultaneously assisting decision-makers to develop relationships with information sources which help them quickly, easily, and cheaply evaluate the credibility of incoming information. Results of the decision-maker survey confirm that decision-makers often use personal relationships, intuition, and reputation to assess the credibility of incoming information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]