Security Expert Influence as Ideational Persuasion: The Case of the Early RAND Corporation

The present paper improves the critical constructivist understanding of idea influence on policymaking by providing a contextual, discursive institutionalist framework for research. It understands policymaking as a subjective activity, inherently bound by the shared language used to communicate and give meaning to action; a realm where ideas contribute to the framing of policy problems and action. By (re)framing their ideas and/or the policy problem, idea entrepreneurs, such as experts and their epistemic communities, render their policy ideas persuasive for other actors through the “manipulation of symbols”, i.e. discursive means such as metaphors and narratives, thereby facilitating the emergence of new language games the rules of which are derived from the idea in question. Embedded in institutions broadly understood, these rules will form the objectivated structure for agency from thereon, linking reflexive agency, discursive means and policy/institutional change in a coherent interpretivist framework. As an empirical demonstration, the paper investigates the epistemic power of civilian nuclear experts in the early days of the RAND Corporation. The history of US nuclear strategy namely offers an interesting case study of idea influence: while the dominant historical narrative is filled with accounts of the enormous effect civilian strategists and their ideas had on deterrence policies, critics note that actual correlation between expert ideas and policy outcomes is sporadic at best. The present paper therefore problematizes the taken-for-granted influence of expert ideas on Cold War US nuclear strategy during the debate on limited war in the early Cold War, and argues that influence should primarily be seen in discursive terms, not in terms of policy outcomes. Put differently, expert influence is more tangible in terms of changing the rules of policymaking than in its output.