The article claims to investigate the process of state decision making (SDM) as such a socio-political and administrative mechanism of societal development, on whose condition the socium’s stability, the citizens’ well-being and many other vitally important indices of the social organism’s functioning depend. The article’s first part published in this issue, tackles discussing the reasons of researchers’ underestimation of the role of the state in the process of SDM, and brings forward a suggestion that it is a number of cognitive pre-orientations leading to idealizing the activity of the state that hinder the latter from being placed in the center of the corresponding explanatory models. To substantiate his position, the author turns to analyzing the specificity of the state as decision maker, accentuating such aspects of this specificity as the structure, the functions and the forms of behavioural activity of the said institution, its contractors, as well as particular features of the object of government and the major parameters of the environment of the SDM.