Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

顾问会影响外交政策吗？如果会影响，又是如何影响的？最近关于精英决策的学术研究优先考虑领导人及其周围的机构，而不是顾问本身的性格。我们认为，尽管外交政策决策具有等级性质，但顾问在审议中提供的建议对使用武力的倾向塑造了国家行为。为了检验我们的论点，我们引入了 1947 年至 1988 年间美国总统及其顾问之间 2,685 次外交政策审议的原始数据集。通过应用一种新颖的机器学习方法来估计 1,134 名冷战时期外交政策决策者的鹰派态度，我们展示了顾问层面的鹰派态度既影响顾问在审议中提供的建议，也影响领导人做出的决定：随着鹰派日益主导辩论，即使考虑到领导人的倾向，冲突性的政策选择也变得更有可能。该理论和研究结果通过展示顾问的倾向（通过顾问提供的建议汇总）如何系统地塑造外交政策行为，丰富了我们对国际冲突的理解。