How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.

领导人如何选择他们的最高级别外交政策任命者？通过围绕国际危机的国内和政府内部政治的正式模型，我研究了塑造领导人任命策略的权衡取舍。在该模型中，领导人选择一名外交政策任命者，预测该任命将如何影响他在危机中收到的建议、选民对其表现的评价，以及最终他和外国同行因此而追求的政策。分析揭示了领导者利用任命来推进其核心政治和政策目标（如阻止外国侵略、获得准确建议和最大化国内认可）的能力中的根本紧张关系：任何推进这些目标之一的任命总是以牺牲另一个目标为代价的，领导者的任命策略必须在这些权衡之间取得平衡。通过分析国防部长和外交部长办公室的跨国任命模式，我发现描述性证据与模型的预测一致：鸽派政党领导人选择跨党派和政治独立任命者的可能性是鹰派政党领导人的两倍多，而且当任何一个政党的领导人接近连任时，这种任命的可能性都较小。