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Theorising Over- and Under-Reaction in International Public Policy: Two Sides of a Misprinted Coin?

Foreign Policy
Governance
Political Psychology
Knowledge
Constructivism
Christoph Meyer
Kings College London
Christoph Meyer
Kings College London

Abstract

When states and international organisations over- and under-react to perceived transboundary threats, their mistakes can have equally harmful consequences for the citizens they mean to protect. Yet, studies of intelligence and conventional foreign policy tend to concentrate on cases of under- reaction only and few studies systematically investigate whether under- and over-reaction may have common causes. Moreover, the identification of cases of under- and overreaction often suffers from 20/20 hindsight and a lack of clarity about whether the under- or over-reaction was genuinely avoidable and actors or organisational entities were culpable. To remedy the problem in the case selection as well as to better theorise the causes of major failures, the first part of the paper develops a typology of over and under-reaction, examines the different judgements and performative acts, and establishes criteria to measure process performance involving four distinct, but interlinked stages. In a second step, the paper puts this framework into action by identifying two cases each of over- and underreaction to very different kinds of transboundary threats: WHO warnings about Swine-Flu of 2009, Air Travel Control response to the Iceland Ash Cloud over Northern Europe of 2010, the descent of Syria into civil war, and the reputational damage to US intelligence as a result of the Snowdon revelations in 2013. These cases, different as they are in terms of threats, the consequences and the key actors, show a number of important commonalities. The failure to learn the right lessons from related crises, institutional silos of decision-making, and motivational biases for or against warning and preventive action as a result of actors pre-existing preferences. The paper concludes by considering the implications for further research and policy practice.