19- Assessing Political Leaders in Theory
and in Practice
Jerrold M. Post and Stephen G. WalkerThe evolution of efforts to assess the impact of leaders upon the
course of events continues to be the subject of lively debates inside
academe and within the policy community. The post—cold war era
has ushered in a world without the bipolar power structure of super-
power rivalry and has raised questions about the predictability of the
new strategic environment. Jervis (1994) has contrasted the strongly
structured, cold war system with the uncertainties of the weakly
structured post—cold war world and has argued that cognition and
other psychological processes will be more important in the latter
environment.
This judgment about the potential relevance of political leaders is
consistent with the general conditions of "action dispensability" arid
"actor dispensability" identified by Greenstein (1987) as necessary
for "personality" to be influential in explaining and predicting polit-
ical outcomes. The focus in this volume on an American president
and a key leader in the Middle East as case studies has extended this
logic by selecting political leaders located in strategic positions in
the post—cold war environment. Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein
are examples of political leaders whose respective actions are likely to
be indispensable in explaining important outcomes in world poli-
tics, because one was the chief executive of the last superpower dur-
ing its unipolar moment following the cold war and the other is the
head of a rogue state located at the crossroads of the main energy
source for the rest of the world (Walker, Schafer, and Young 1999;
Mastanduno 1997).
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