Political Science Educator: volume 28, issue 1
Reflections
By Jen Spindel (Jennifer.Spindel@unh.edu)
Announcing that you are going to spend a semester studying bureaucracy is a great way to kill the beginning-of-semester enthusiasm for a new course. Bureaucracy?! So boring! It evokes conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and causes glazed-over eyes from students who think only of red tape, government inefficiencies, and waste. In my course on national security policy, I designed an exercise to help students understand how and why bureaucracy matters using the fictional Star Wars universe.
Although some students are familiar with Star Wars, knowledge of the movies is not necessary. But taking students away from the “real world” lets them put aside their assumptions about how different organizations would or should act. I designed this exercise after the pandemic to get students out of their seats and moving around the classroom early in the semester.
The work we do prior to this activity on bureaucratic politics explains that bureaucracies want to access power and autonomy, preserve their mission, and increase their budgets (Alden and Arran 2017; Jentleson 2013). To help illustrate this, I walk students through the key US agencies involved in national security policymaking, including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State, and USAID. We compare their budgets, their missions, and their seats at various tables (Treasury Department, n.d.). We discuss the role of veto players (in general and in the national security context) and pay attention to the changing construction of the National Security Council over time (Bellinger 2021; Brunner 2017). I explain that bureaucratic actors need to prove their worth, defend their budgets, and protect their core missions. This theoretical and conceptual scope is a necessary foundation for the course, but students often find it dry and boring. Even after showing students the complicated and overlapping organizational charts for Homeland Security and Defense and the explosive growth in their budget outlays (Homeland Security 2023; Department of Defense 2019), students still see bureaucracy as boring and inconsequential.
The Star Wars Bureaucracy activity that I designed puts students in the role of a department director on the Rebel Council. The prompt encourages students to think like bureaucratic actors, and I remind them of our discussion about bureaucratic behavior. They are challenged to figure out how to work together to protect Rebel interests from a possible attack, all while proving their department’s worth, defending their budget, and protecting their mission from encroachment by other departments. They are told that an attack is likely to come from one of six planets: Naboo, Tatooine, Coruscant, Yavin, Hoth, or Alderaan.
I then divide students into groups of five; each group acts as its own Rebel Council. One student is the head of the Rebel Council, and the others are the director of different rebel agencies: Defense, Spy, Intelligence, and Diplomacy. Each student has a sheet of paper with bits of intelligence, their bureaucratic interests. For example, the Diplomacy director is primed to be protective of its core mission, and is instructed “that increased investment in diplomacy will pay large dividends. You’re hoping to establish embassies and consulates in places that have long been forgotten. You’re opposed to increased defense spending. This is a time for pens, not swords.” By contrast, the Defense director is told “Your information comes from the goodwill you believe is generated by your military presence and support for friendly and allied causes. You want to prove your value to the Rebel Alliance, because with increased funding, you can upgrade your materiel and increase your number of operations. While you think diplomacy is important, you also think it needs to be backed by military might.” This information primes the Rebel Defense leader to be protective of access to power. Each director is also given a nugget of intelligence that they can choose to share, or not, with the Rebel Council Leader. The Spy director knows “Unbeknownst to the others, you have spies in place on ALL of the planets, including Alderaan. You are hearing rumors that disgruntled factions on Alderaan might be channeling information to the Empire, to help them confuse your intelligence collections.” They are also told, “Your sources on Coruscant and Naboo indicate there is no threat from those places. If you had to bet, your money is on Tatooine or Yavin.” Each department has similar information and likely candidate planets, and there is not consensus about the likely origin of an attack. I deliberately constructed the exercise so that there is no “right” answer.
With only vague and partial information, each student must determine how to strategically reveal information to their Rebel Council to show that (a) their department is valuable and should get more funding, (b) that more funding would help them get better and more timely information, and (c) prevent an attack. After the Rebel Councils meet for about 20 minutes, I ask each Rebel Leader to allocate $500 in funding and to privately tell me the planet they determined was most likely to be the origin of an attack. After each group has submitted its decision, I write the names of the chosen planets on the board.
Students are generally shocked to see that the groups came to different conclusions! Because there is no right answer, each Rebel Council focuses on different information based on the types of arguments and the information each director chooses to reveal. Students’ bureaucratic negotiations about priorities, information, and desire to prove their worth means each Rebel Council comes to a different conclusion. Most recently, the five groups in this exercise chose Hoth, Yavin, Alderaan, and two groups chose Tatooine.
After getting over their initial shock at the different conclusions, we discuss why each Rebel Council came to a different conclusion. While the planets chosen vary year to year, the explanations are consistent. Students will explain that they withheld some information because they didn’t want a different Department to undermine their own authority or access to power. Other students share that they were skeptical of the information provided by Defense, because the Defense representative was so adamant about getting more money. Usually, the Diplomatic representative makes an alliance with Defense or Intelligence to try to piggyback off what they assume will be a larger share of the budget. The debrief discussion allows me to return to discussing the theory of logic and bureaucracy, and use their specific experiences in the activity to talk through examples of bureaucracy at work. The students’ initial frustration at the lack of a clear right answer quickly yields to a deeper appreciation of bureaucracy. It is a particularly helpful example of how bureaucracies generate their own bureaucratic interests.
Beyond illustrating the ways that bureaucracies work, the timing of the activity just three weeks into the semester helps students come together and learn each other’s names. By this point, add/drop is settled, and students have established their location in the classroom. But in the post-COVID era, students need an extra push to directly engage with one another. Following this exercise, I have consistently observed students using each other’s names, working more easily with their peers in future small group activities, and seeming more comfortable speaking in class (Asal and Blake 2007; Clark and Scherpereel 2024). This exercise is particularly helpful post-pandemic, because students learn the names of at least five other classmates in a low-stakes small-group setting, which helps students who are reluctant to talk to one another slowly break down those hesitancies. I also find that revealing my excitement about science fiction and fantasy (we do an exercise using Star Trek in the middle of the semester) helps the students see me as more than the person lecturing to them; following the exercise, students have shared their own interest in TV or movies that they think I might also like. Overall, the exercise creates a welcoming—if nerdy—environment that shows students often there are no right answers, and that the strength of one’s argument and logic is a crucial skill to develop during the class.
Fellow faculty interested in adopting the Star Wars Bureaucracy game for their own class are welcome to email me for a copy of the activity. I have avoided publicly posting it on my website so that future students cannot get a head start on the activity!
References
Alden, Chris and Amnon Arran. 2017. Foreign Policy Analysis: New Approaches. Routledge.
Asal, Victor, and Elizabeth L. Blake. 2006. “Creating Simulations for Political Science Education.” Journal of Political Science Education 2(1): 1-18.
Bellinger, John. 2021. “National Security Memorandum 2—What’s New in Biden’s NSC Structure?” Lawfare [blog], February 8. https://www.lawfareblog.com/national-security-memorandum-2-whats-new-bidens-nsc-structure.
Brunner, Jordan. 2017. “NSPM 2—Organization of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council: A Summary.” Lawfare [blog], January 28. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/nspm-2—organization-national-security-council-and-homeland-security-council-summary.
Clark, Nick and John A. Scherpereel. 2024. “Do Political Science Simulations Promote Knowledge, Engagement, Skills, and Empathy?” Journal of Political Science Education 20(1): 133-152.
Department of Defense. 2019. “DoD Organizational Structure.” June 24. https://www.whs.mil/Portals/75/EEOP/FY%202018%20MD-715%20Federal%20Agency%20Annual%20EEO%20Organizational%20Chart.pdf?ver=8Rfq9nfDg0OiJFc_1aplEw%3D%3D
Department of Homeland Security. 2023. “Organizational Chart.” November 29. https://www.dhs.gov/organizational-chart
Jentleson, Bruce. 2014. American Foreign Policy. WW Norton.
Treasury Department. n.d. “How much has the US government spent this year?” Fiscal Data [web site]. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
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Jen Spindel is an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. She teaches courses on international and national security, technology and war, and international affairs. Her research focuses on international security, the arms trade, and civil-military relations.
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