Assessing Political Leaders in Theory and in Practicecreate a gap that needs to be bridged between the supply of academic
knowledge and the demand for policy-relevant knowledge (George
1993, 115-34).
Accompanying this difference is a confidence gap between the two
cultures of academic theory and policymaking practice. Occupants of
each world have reservations about the activities of the other.
According to George, practitioners object to the efforts of academics
to put their research in general theoretical terms on a scientific basis,
especially when presented in a quantitative form or developed under
controlled laboratory conditions. Such efforts are viewed as weak
generalizations based on inadequate data, which can lead to irrele-
vant predictions and a false sense of confidence in the ability to
understand and control foreign policy (George 1993, 6—11).
In turn, academics have their reservations about the use by policy-
makers of an outdated realist theory of international relations, a focus
on the exercise of power that leads to simplistic diagnoses of policy
problems. Worse yet are atheoretical decisions based on tacit
assumptions or unrepresentative historical analogies, such as lessons
drawn from the British failure to appease Germany at Munich or the
American failure to prevent a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by
Japan. Other intelligence failures stem from images of the external
world not subjected to social scientific scrutiny due to the intrusion
of political considerations into intelligence estimates, which perpet-
uate distorted images that serve the interests of the policymaker
(George 1993, 11-15).
There is a certain irony about these gaps between academics and
practitioners, because there are parallel differences among schools of
thought within the academic field of international relations.
Although it has some competition from liberalism and construc-
tivism, realism is still one of the dominant paradigms for the orga-
nization of knowledge in this field (Katzenstein, Keohane, and Kras-
ner 1998). The theories associated with each of these approaches
share a structural bias, which is that the individual leader does not
matter much in the conduct of international relations. Depending on
the paradigm at hand, realists see leaders as rational calculators of the
relationships between national goals and national power; liberals
conceptualize them as conformists to rules embodied in international
or domestic institutions; and constructivists characterize them as