Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

Profiling Political Leaders

seemed that the powerful forces of the rival Western and Eastern
blocs significantly reduced and constrained the capacity of individual
leaders to affect the course of events in the arena of foreign policy.
Yet few would doubt that the leadership actions of John F. Kennedy,
Fidel Castro, and Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962; of Richard
Nixon in China; of Jimmy Carter at Camp David; and of Ronald
Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin in the twilight of the
cold war made a difference.

The History of Leader Profiling: Two Historical Strands

In reviewing the historical development of the psychological assess-

ment of political leaders, one is confronted with two strands: devel-

opments within the academic interdiscipline of political psychology

and applications in support of policy within the government. The

two efforts developed from different disciplinary perspectives and

had quite different goals. Within the academic community the goal

was to expand knowledge concerning the psychology of leadership;

within the government the goal was to assist in high-level negotia-

tions and during politico-military crises. Initially, leading academic

scholars came principally from the disciplines of social psychology

and political science, while clinically trained psychiatrists played a

leading role in developing the government program. The academic

approach focused more on individual traits or trait constellations

leading to the development of rigorous quantitative methodologies

to assess leader traits; the applied strand emphasized a more compre-

hensive approach, integrating psychobiography and psychodynamic

psychology, producing qualitative case studies. To be sure, the

strands did not develop in hygienic isolation, and the government

efforts in applied political psychology were enriched by contribu-

tions from academic political psychology. Other disciplines, such as

cultural anthropology, clinical psychology, political sociology, and

history, usefully augmented the perspective of the core disciplines

and contributed to the advance of the field in both settings. Having

said that, the paths of development were in fact quite different.

Part i of this volume contains two historical overviews represent-

ing these two strands: the development of quantitative methods in

the academic community and the development of the qualitative

case study method in government.