With these as a starting point, a policy analyst’s attention is immediately focused on power and politics within and among executive branch bureaucracies. Within the confines of the executive branch, Allison’s model combines and makes little distinction between politics and administration, and in doing so seems to answer the challenge laid down by Gaus. In studying bureaucracy, as Allison put it, “the name of the game is politics: bargaining along regularized circuits among players positioned hierarchically within the government. Government behavior can thus be understood . . . as a result of these bargaining games” (1971, 144). Model
III sees the components of the executive branch as semiautonomous organizations that do not act in unison on a series of single strategic issues, but act on a variety of issues according to their own conceptions of national, organizational, and individual goals. Instead of making policy and implementation decisions according to rational self-interest, or according to the dictates of SOPs, government actors decide on the basis of the “pulling and hauling” that is politics.