The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersexamining evidence, inferences, and conclusions (Runyari 1982,
144).
As argued previously, prediction is a precarious, though not
impossible, task. However, in addition to the excellent suggestions
contained in Runyan's (1982, 121—91) seminal treatment of case
study and ideographic approaches to biographical analysis, there is
one further step that can be taken. It shares some similarities with,
and some advantages of, prediction, but it is not wholly retrospec-
tive. Yet, of necessity, it makes much use of the past in developing
causal links to a president's future. I characterize this strategy as the
analysis of consistency. The basic and uncomplicated idea behind this
approach is to compare the degree to which one's theoretical under-
standing of a president or candidate at time one is consistent with his
behavior at time two.^8
Conclusion
The psychological analysis of presidents and other leaders is likely to
persist, in spite of all of its controversies and difficulties, for two very
fundamental and important reasons. First, the underlying psychol-
ogy that motivates how presidents see and try to shape the world is
related to their exercise of power. If we want to understand what they
do, we had better have useful theories of why they do it. Second, vari-
ations in the psychology that presidents and leaders bring to their
positions affect what they will, won't, or can't do. In short, there is
an enormous practical set of implications to leaders' levels of ambi-
tion and the skills (or lack thereof) that accompany them; their ideals
and values, along with their capacity to remain faithful to them; and
how the leaders truly feel about the many kinds of relationships with
which they must contend.
It is hard to imagine that any theoretical stance that does not
require of its practitioner that he or she be immersed in the details of
a leader's ongoing life will bring the level of confidence in the theo-
retical understanding or validity required by this critical task. Sixty
years ago Lasswell (1930, i) observed, "political science without
biography is a form of taxidermy."
Since Lasswell wrote those words, developments in psychoanalytic
theory and its increasingly sophisticated application in a variety of
settings have brought us to the point where we might well add the