The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersthe variation in outcomes across situations. Decision-making theo-
rists have long argued that these mechanisms are not rational
processes endogenous to structural conditions and may have an
important autonomous impact on decisions and outcomes. Assessing
the conditions under which "personality" as a causal mechanism
becomes more important is necessary to determine the fit between a
structural theory and a particular case under analysis. At this point,
the objective is precisely to determine whether the case in question
conforms to the covering-law generalization from a structural theory
about a universe of cases or deviates from it due to the operation of
intervening causal mechanisms between structural conditions and
decision outcomes.
The causal mechanism may operate either endogenously within
the theory so that the generalization is valid in some cases or
autonomously to make the generalization invalid in other cases. A
weak claim for the importance of the latter possibility is that causal
mechanisms occasionally operate to disrupt the effects of structural
conditions located at macrolevels of analysis (Holsti 1976; Green-
stein 1987; Hermann 1976; George 1979). A strong claim is to
argue that such disruptions are more likely to be the rule rather than
the exception (Jervis 1976, 1997; Little 1998). The latter position is
a critique of the inherent underspecification of simple structural
models, especially for the analysis of individual cases. Greenstein's
(1987) conditions of "action dispensability" and "actor dispensabil-
ity" are efforts to resolve this dispute regarding when the causal
mechanisms of personality—beliefs, traits, and psychodynamic
processes—are likely to have an autonomous effect on outcomes.
In the following chapters, the authors probe the microfoundations
of political behavior by analyzing a variety of causal mechanisms
with different methods of content analysis. These methods operate at
different layers of analysis within the leader's personality. Collec-
tively, the authors cover the cognitive states, affective traits, and
characterological structure of the leader's personality and the corre-
sponding mechanisms of object appraisal, mediation of selr-other
relationships, externalization, and ego defense (Greenstein 1987; see
also Smith 1968).
The first two chapters by Post and by Renshon explore the
processes of externalization and ego defense generated by the deep