Profiling the Operational Codes of Political LeadersHow Do Beliefs and Motivations Form a Coherent Personality?Seen in this dual perspective and without the assumption of internal
cognitive consistency, the cognitive and motivational elements of a
leader's operational code nonetheless form a coherent personality. As
George and Holsti speculated and as the studies cited previously
have confirmed, however, this personality may be rather complex
and may engage different "states of mind" in different domains of the
political universe. Thus, the typology of operational codes in figure
9.2 may coexist in the same leader and become aroused differentially,
depending on the domain in which he or she is engaged and the cues
from that environment (Walker 1995; Walker, Schafer, and Young
1998, 1999).
This perspective suggests that the empirical task of mapping a
leader's operational code beliefs should proceed from the bottom up,
by aggregating targeted beliefs about particular issues in different
domains of political action, rather than from the top down, as deduc-
tions from an idealized typology of operational code belief systems.
Any generalizations about a leader's general operational code will
depend on whether and to what extent his or her beliefs regarding
self and others are consistent across domains and over time. In turn,
predicting a leader's behavior from operational code beliefs will
require careful attention to scope conditions that specify the level of
generalization on which the prediction is based. The VICS method of
content analysis was developed as part of a bottom-up strategy to
identify a leader's operational code beliefs and to make contingent
forecasts of his or her likely strategies, tactics, and moves.
The Verbs in Context System
The VICS method draws inferences about a leader's operational code
from public sources—speeches, interviews, or other public state-
ments by the individual. The most relevant source for the systematic
prediction of the state's behavior is probably the public speech. It is
a theoretical assumption of operational code analysis that a leader's
public behavior is constrained by his public image and that, over
time, his public actions will consistently match his public beliefs.
This assumption seems counterintuitive, because it appears not to
allow for the possibilities of impression management and deception