14- William Jefferson Clinton:
Beliefs and Integrative Complexity
The profiles of Bill Clinton in this chapter focus on his beliefs and
cognitive style during his tenure in office. The content and structure
of his cognitions are two aspects of the process of object appraisal,
which both represent reality and express the leader's personality. In
the following sections, the authors identify diagnostic and choice
propensities in Clinton's operational code beliefs and examine the
integrative complexity of his thought processes to assess their likely
impact on his behavior as the president of the United States.
Operational Code Beliefs and Object Appraisal
Stephen G. Walker, Mark Schafer, and Michael D. Young
The following analysis of President Clinton's operational code is
based on a sample of sixteen speeches from public sources for three
months (January—March 1994) during his first term. Each speech
was machine-coded with Profiler+, an automated content analysis
software package, using the VICS coding procedures described in
chapter 9 (see also Young 2001; Schafer and Walker 2001). The reli-
ability of the results is very high because the coding process was
automated and, therefore, perfectly reproducible, The following
analysis of Clinton's beliefs is in terms of their direction and inten-
sity compared to the average VICS scores for a norming group of
twenty world leaders from different regions and eras.
The validity of the results is subject to the degree of generaliz-
ability from the sample to the population of speeches and other pub-
lic statements by President Clinton. Since the sample does not cover
an extended time period, its generalizability is limited unless one
assumes that operational code beliefs are personality traits and not324