The Psychological Assessment of Political LeadersNews Connection, and are reported by other governments' informa-
tion agencies on their Web sites. Interviews with political elites who
reside within the United States are often found in such newspapers as
the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as in weekly news
magazines and as recorded from weekly television news programs.
Presidential press conferences and other interviews with the presi-
dents can be found in each one's Presidential Papers.
It is particularly important in collecting interview materials that
one locate verbatim responses—that, indeed, the full text as spoken
by the leader is available. At times, newspapers and magazines will
survey or edit interviews with leaders, making it difficult to know
how representative the reported material is of what was said. We are
not interested in what the particular media outlet believes will sell
newspapers or magazines but in how the leaders presented them-
selves in that setting.
In the course of my completing profiles of the leadership styles of
some 122 political leaders, it has become evident that the analyst can
develop an adequate assessment of leadership style based on fifty
interview responses of one hundred words or more in length.
Confidence in one's profile, of course, increases the number of inter-
view responses the analyst can assess, but any profile will suffer if it
is determined on fewer than fifty responses. To ensure that the
description of leadership style is not context-specific, the fifty inter-
view responses that are analyzed should span the leader's tenure in
office, as well as have occurred in different types of interview set-
tings, and should focus on a variety of topics. Collecting and catego-
rizing interview responses by time, audience, and topic provide a
means for assessing how stable the traits composing leadership style
are. Such data indicate how relatively sensitive or insensitive to the
context a particular leader is.
It is also possible to classify interviews on their degree of spon-
taneity, facilitating the analyst's gaining some insight into the dif-
ferences between a leader's public and private selves. The least spon-
taneous interviews are those where the political figure calls
interviewers into his or her office to present a plan or to report on
what is happening or where the political leader asks reporters to
submit questions ahead of time and preselects those to answer, plan-
ning the responses. The most spontaneous interviews are those where