The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersdiscarded. The remainder describes the leader's beliefs about the
intended or imagined exercise of power by self and others regarding
the political issues raised in the public statement. They are also the
basis for drawing inferences about subsequent behavior by the
leader's government. Predictions based on these inferences can be
very general or rather specific, depending on the variety of policy
domains and issue areas and the volume of attributes available to be
coded from the universe of public statements.
How Are VICS Indices Calculated and Interpreted?
These assessments are inferred from four kinds of indices constructed
from the balance, central tendency, proportion, and dispersion of
verb attributions in these sources. For example, the balance between
the frequencies of positive (+) and negative (—) verbs attributed to
others in public statements indicates the leader's beliefs about the
friendly or hostile nature of politics and image of others in the polit-
ical universe. The same calculation for verbs attributed to self indi-
cates the strategic orientation (cooperation or conflict) of the speaker
toward others in the political universe.
Assigning weights to the same verb categories and multiplying
them by their frequencies measures the intensity of positive and neg-
ative attributions by self and others. The central tendencies of these
weighted self and other attributions, respectively, are indicators of
the leader's beliefs about effective tactics and the prospects for real-
izing political values. These four indices summarize at the most gen-
eral level of aggregation the leader's diagnostic propensities regard-
ing the nature of the political universe and the prospects for success,
plus the leader's choice propensities for effective strategies and tac-
tics. The calculation and interpretation of these indices are fairly
straightforward and are summarized as follows.
The balance indices for the nature of the political universe (P-i)
and strategic direction (I-i) vary between -i .o (e.g., Extremely Hos-
tile for P-i) and +1.0 (e.g., Extremely Friendly for P-i), calculated
by subtracting the number of negative verbs from the number of
positive verbs and dividing the result by the total number of nega-
tive and positive verbs. The scale illustrates the range of values asso-
ciated with each index and the remaining descriptors used to anchor
and interpret the scores. A particular score is anchored to an inter-