The Psychological Assessment of Political LeadersThe Paired Comparisons MethodWinter's study of international crises (1997) illustrates another way
of handling the problem of comparability of material. He intended
to compare motive imagery in paired crises, one of which escalated to
war and the other of which was peacefully resolved. To ensure gener-
ality of the results, he drew from a broad range of crises (e.g., the
Mexican War verus the Oregon boundary settlement; the 1909
Bosnian crisis versus World War I; Soviet 1956 intervention in
Hungary versus nonintervention in Poland; U.S. nonintervention in
Indochina in 1954 versus intervention in 1964—65; and Iraq's
threatened annexation of Kuwait in 1961 versus its actual invasion
in 1990). No single kind of comparable documents exists for all
these crises. However, within each pair there were one or more kinds
of comparable documents, so that it is possible to construct a series
of within-pair comparisons.
For example, both the Mexican War and the Oregon boundary
settlement are extensively mentioned in President Folk's published
diary and his annual messages to Congress, and the diplomatic
exchanges with Mexico and Great Britain are also published. For
both Indochina in 1954 and Vietnam in 1964—65, there are presi-
dential press conferences and speeches by other American officials,
from which material relevant to the topic at hand (i.e., the crisis) can
be selected for scoring.^4 For the Jefferson-Lincoln-Kennedy compar-
ison discussed previously, the inaugurals of each president could be
compared to those of the presidents serving immediately before and
immediately after them, as a way of ruling out extraneous influences
and further tightening the comparisons.
Texts
Scoring should be done on verbatim texts. For U.S. research, the Pub-
lic Papers of the Presidents series (and its more quickly available serial
form, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents) provides a verba-
tim record of every word that the president speaks "on the record."
This series goes back as far as Herbert Hoover; before that time, the
series A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents includes
major presidential speeches and papers. For the U.S. Congress there
is the Congressional Record and its predecessor, the Congressional Globe.