The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersto integrate the life experiences that shaped and gave form to that
political personality. As Brewster-Smith (1968) has emphasized,
that goes beyond the family environment and must encompass the
historical, political, and cultural context as well. This emphasis on
the life course and the entirety of the political personality, integrat-
ing longitudinal life course analysis with the cross-sectional analysis
of personality, stands in contrast to the approaches of political psy-
chology scholars who have focused on particular elements of political
personality, such as political cognition, political drives and motives,
and other traits.
The Methodology for Developing Political Personality ProfilesThe method for developing political personality profiles is drawn
from the clinical case study methodology, also known as the anam-
nesis, which integrates a longitudinal and cross-sectional
approach. In the longitudinal consideration, the life course of the
subject is reviewed, constructing a psychobiography. The cross-
sectional approach analyzes the subject's cognition, affect, and
interpersonal relationships, attempting to define the nature of the
basic personality.
But in applying this approach to political figures, the method
developed necessarily goes well beyond clinical case studies, focusing
on life course and personality features that bear particularly on polit-
ical leadership. In contrast to the psychobiographic reconstruction of
the clinical case study of the psychiatric patient, in which the pri-
mary task is to analyze the traumatic events in the life course that
predisposed to the present illness, in the psychobiographic recon-
struction of the life course of a political leader, the goal is to under-
stand shaping life events that influenced core attitudes, political per-
sonality, leadership, and political behavior. Similarly, in the
cross-sectional personality study of a political leader, the goal is not
to specify dimensions of psychopathology but rather to identify
characteristic adaptive styles and those aspects of cognition, atti-
tudes, affect, and interpersonal relations that bear on specific ele-
ments of leadership functioning, such as leadership style, crisis deci-
sion making, negotiating style, as well as the identification of those
political issues that are especially salient for the subjects' psychology.
An outline of the longitudinal and cross-sectional elements consid-