Profiling Political LeadersTetlock present a discussion of integrative cognitive complexity as it
relates to a leader's behavior.
Part 3 of this volume is divided into two sections containing a
series of psychological assessments of two leaders: William Jefferson
Clinton and Saddam Hussein. For each leader, a comprehensive qual-
itative case study evaluation combining a psychobiographic analysis
and a character analysis is first presented. Drawing on his Neustadt
Award—winning analysis of President Clinton, High Hopes, Stanley
A. Renshon presents in section A a psychoanalytically oriented por-
trait of Clinton. In section B, drawing on the political psychology
profile of Saddam Hussein he offered in testimony during hearings
on the Gulf crisis before the House Armed Services Committee and
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jerrold M. Post presents a
psychodynamic portrait of Saddam Hussein. Following these com-
prehensive qualitative assessments are chapters in which the person-
ality traits, leadership style, beliefs, and cognitive style of each leader
are addressed, employing manifest and latent strategies of quantita-
tive content analysis. They offer complementary analyses of these
leaders and illustrate the possible uses of different assessment tools.
Each of the leaders presents a different type of problem for assess-
ment, inference, and prediction. President Clinton is the leader of a
democratic regime operating in a complex institutional setting
where political power is fragmented among powerful bureaucratic
agencies and shared by different branches of government responsive
to different constituencies. In contrast, Saddam Hussein is a rela-
tively autonomous leader with political power residing primarily in
his hands within the context of an authoritarian regime. The con-
tributors discuss how their profiles of Clinton and Hussein illustrate
the use of sources and the types of cases encountered in doing this
kind of research.
Collectively, the authors and cases in this volume represent the
current state of the art in profiling political leaders. In the conclusion
in part 4, there is a review of the prospects for further progress and
the need for more research in this area of political psychology. While
the prospects for reducing the psychological assessment of leaders
under a single approach are not imminent, this discussion does iden-
tify possible strategies for integrating results, methods, and research
problems.