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Situational Variables, Experiential Filters, and Political Performance 615

Millonian perspective. Best known among these is the widely

used Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory–III (MCMI-III;

Millon, Davis, & Millon, 1996), a standard clinical diagnos-

tic tool employed worldwide. The Millon Index of Personal-

ity Styles (MIPS; Millon, 1994a) was developed to assess

and classify personality in nonclinical (e.g., corporate) set-

tings. Similarly, Strack (1991) developed the Personality

Adjective Check List (PACL) for gauging normal personality

styles. Oldham and Morris, in their trade book, The New Per-

sonality Self-Portrait(1995), offer a self-administered instru-

ment congruent with Millon’s model. Immelman (1999;

Immelman & Steinberg, 1999) adapted the Millon Inventory

of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC) from Millon’s work, specifi-

cally for the assessment of personality in politics.

Immelman (1998, 2002) uses the MIDC to synthesize,

transform, and systematize diagnostically relevant informa-

tion collected from the literature on political figures (primar-

ily biographical sources and media reports) into Millon’s

(1990) four data levels (behavioral, phenomenological, in-

trapsychic, and biophysical). The next section outlines the

Millonian approach to political personality assessment.

A Theory-Driven Psychodiagnostic

Assessment Methodology

Favoring the more systematic, quantitative, nomothetic

approach advocated by Simonton (1986, 1988, 1990),

Immelman (1993, 1998, 2002) adapted Millon’s model of

personality (1986, 1990, 1994a, 1996; Millon & Davis, 2000;

Millon & Everly, 1985) for the indirect assessment of person-

ality in politics. Immelman’s (1999) approach is equivalent to

Simonton’s (1986, 1988) in that it quantifies, reduces, and or-

ganizes qualitative data extracted from the public record. It is

dedicated to quantitative measurement, but unlike the cur-

rently popular five-factor model, which is atheoretical, the

Millonian approach is theory driven. The assessment method-

ology yields a personality profile derived from clinical analy-

sis of diagnostically relevant content in biographical

materials and media reports, which provides an empirical

basis for predicting the subject’s political performance and

policy orientation (Immelman, 1998).

Sources of Data

Immelman (1998, 1999, 2002) gathers diagnostic informa-

tion pertaining to the personal and public lives of political

figures from a variety of published materials, selected with a

view to securing broadly representative data sets. Pertinent

selection criteria include comprehensiveness of scope (e.g.,

coverage of developmental history as well as political

career), inclusiveness of literary genre (e.g., biography, auto-

biography, scholarly analysis, and media reports), and the

writer’s perspective (e.g., a balance between admiring and

critical accounts).

Personality Inventory

Greenstein (1992) criticizes analysts who “categorize their

subjects without providing the detailed criteria and justifi-

cations for doing so” (p. 120). In Immelman’s (1999)

approach, the diagnostic criteria are documented by means of

a structured assessment instrument, the second edition of the

MIDC (Immelman & Steinberg, 1999), which was compiled

and adapted from Millon’s (1990, 1996; Millon & Everly,

1985) prototypal features and diagnostic criteria for normal

personality styles and their pathological variants. The justifi-

cation for classification decisions is provided by documenta-

tion from independent biographical sources. The Millon

Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria Manual (Immelman, 1999)

describes the construction, administration, scoring, and inter-

pretation of the MIDC. The 12 MIDC scales (see Immelman,

1999, 2002, for the full MIDC taxonomy) correspond to

major personality patterns posited by Millon (e.g., 1994a,

1996) and are coordinated with the normal personality styles

described by Oldham and Morris (1995) and Strack (1997).

Diagnostic Procedure

The diagnostic procedure can be summarized as a three-part

process: first, an analysisphase (data collection) in which

source materials are reviewed and analyzed to extract and

code diagnostically relevant psychobiographical content;

second, a synthesis phase (scoring and interpretation) in

which the unifying framework provided by the MIDC proto-

typal features, keyed for attribute domain and personality

pattern, is employed to classify the diagnostically relevant in-

formation extracted in phase 1; and finally, an evaluation

phase (inference) in which theoretically grounded descrip-

tions, explanations, inferences, and predictions are extrapo-

lated from Millon’s theory of personality, based on the

personality profile constructed in phase 2 (Immelman, 1998,

1999, 2002).

SITUATIONAL VARIABLES, EXPERIENTIAL

FILTERS, AND POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

Greenstein (1992) cautions against “the psychologizing and

clinical fallacies” of explaining behavior in terms of person-

ality while ignoring situational determinants (p. 121). This,

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