Simulating Three Foreign Policy Decision-Making Models with <i>13 Days</i>

ABSTRACT This article describes a novel series of classroom simulations for teaching Graham Allison’s (1971) three seminal models of foreign policy decision making (i.e., the Rational Actor Model, the Organizational Process Model, and the Bureaucratic Politics Model) and demonstrates the effectiveness of those simulations. The simulations utilize the commercially available board game, 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. The game is a close approximation of the Rational Actor Model. The author developed two additional rule variants to represent the Organizational Process Model and the Bureaucratic Politics Model. The effectiveness of the simulations was evaluated with both a survey and a quiz administered to a treatment section that experienced the simulations and a control section that did not. The results indicate that the simulations are effective pedagogical tools associated with higher student excitement and enjoyment of the material, higher quiz scores, and an increased ability to self-assess understanding of the material.