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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS/POLITICAL SCIENCE
19 November 2019

The Effects of Leader Characteristics on Foreign Policy

On 24 October Juliet Kaarbo, Professor of Foreign Policy and the Co-director of the Centre for Security Research at the University of Edinburgh, UK, gave a colloquium, “Breaking Bad: Leader Personality Change across Time and Implications for Foreign Policy.” Juliet Kaarbo, who had previously been an associate professor at the Institute, spoke as part of the Institute’s International Relations and Political Science Colloquium Series. 

Professor Kaarbo, a leader in the field of comparative foreign policy research, presented the conceptual basis for, as well as some of the initial methodological issues connected with, a new research project she is beginning on long-time leaders’ personality changes. We know, she pointed out, that numerous leaders have been in office for many years, in some cases, literally for multiple decades. Given prior work on both leadership and belief change, it is a priori reasonable to hypothesise that prolonged tenure in office may result in greater authoritarianism, less cognitive complexity, and higher degrees of hubris; the implications of this “breaking bad” for resultant foreign policies are apparent. However, both the exact causal mechanisms by which particular personality traits might accentuate and influence foreign policy, and the scope conditions (circumstances) under which those mechanisms might be strongest, remain to be specified.

Professor Kaarbo spent some time in the colloquium discussing possible design issues, notably the issue of large, multileader data series. The latter, whether in the form of leadership trait analysis scores or operational code classifications, are based on speeches which, qua personality traits, may differ in important respects from more nuanced measures. As regards the issue of “badness” in foreign policy, dataset construction, particularly keeping scores separate from personality characteristics, is a knotty problem. Nonetheless, as she pointed out in the Q&A, we know intuitively that personality influences foreign policy (she called Trump “the gift that keeps on giving”), and so the problem is to scale up the analysis from individual cases.

As is the standard practice of the Department of International Relations/Political Science (IR/PS), the lecture was followed by a discussion led by Laura Schenker, PhD Candidate in IR/PS. The discussion gave way to several questions which open up further lines of inquiry: How does aging matter across democracies and autocracies? What kind of a relationship can we observe between experiences and ages of leaders? Concerning the scope conditions, under what conditions does Professor Kaarbo’s argument hold? How are the effects of the independent variables at the individual and process levels interrelated? What is the opposite of breaking bad? Is case selection immune from selection bias threat? What is the role of a presidential speechwriter? Is it important to consider the speeches of ministers? Is it possible to increase the unit of analysis by looking at non-state actors and opposition leaders?

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By Buğra Güngör, PhD Candidate in International Relations and Political Science.
Banner picture: excerpt from a photo of the G20 Osaka Summit 2019.