Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy

Abstract

Scholarship on elites and foreign policy has made important advances in identifying who elites are, what elites want, and how elites influence foreign policy. This review assesses these advances, focusing on the tension between elites’ expertise, on the one hand, and resentment of elites as selfish or unrepresentative of the people's interests, on the other. What remains missing in the literature on elites and foreign policy are the dynamics of elite politics. The same elites can behave very differently in different settings, and elites frequently do not get what they want on foreign policy despite strong preferences. To understand this variation, we need more research on three kinds of elite politics: how elites attain their positions; their incentives once they arrive in those positions; and how elites relate to each other and to mass publics. Without attending to elite politics, we miss important sources of state behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.