Profiling the Operational Codes of Political Leadersbased on the leader's attributions of strategic and locus of control
beliefs to Self and Other. Collectively, the key VICS indices take into
account both the dispositions of the leader (I-i, P~4a) and important
features of the context for decision (P-1, P-4-b) to reach a definition
of the "self-in-situation." This definition of the situation reflects the
choice and shift propensities attributed to Self and expected of
Other, as described in the general types of instrumental beliefs asso-
ciated with the locations of Self and Other in the quadrants of the
Holsti typology.
The changing locations for the generalized self and other images of
Carter, Rabin, and Peres across the quadrants of the template in figures
9.3 and 9.4 lead to different diagnoses regarding the expected behav-
ior of others and their own likely choice and shift propensities for dif-
ferent kinds of strategies and tactics. They are based on the antecedent
conditions specified by the VICS indices that locate both Self and
Other in their respective quadrants of the prediction template in figure
9.4. The results in table 9.3 for Carter and in table 9.4 for the Israeli
leaders Rabin and Peres are examples of this type of analysis.
Finally, over the past two years the generation of several leader
profiles with an automated version of the VICS content analysis pro-
cedures has led to the transformation of raw VICS scores for leaders
into normed scores calculated as the number of standard deviations
from the mean score for each element of the operational code con-
struct (see Young 2001; Schafer and Walker 2001; Walker, Schafer,
and Marfleet 2001). The anchor descriptors on the continua for the
raw scores (Somewhat, Definitely, Very, and Extremely) are now
applied to these standardized scores at intervals of one-half standard
deviation above and below their respective means for a group of
twenty world leaders from a variety of geographical regions and his-
torical eras.
The standardized scores express a leader's score for each index
compared to the average for the reference group. The operational
code profiles of William Jefferson Clinton and Saddam Hussein in
this volume will employ standardized scores to interpret each
leader's diagnostic, choice, and shift propensities in the context of
this sample of world leaders. They will allow us to determine if their
scores are typical or whether and how they deviate from the average
scores for the reference group.