Search Results

Chapter 7 explores the mutual relevance of reputation and personality, two important constructs that appear to address the same question: What kind of person is this individual? A primary claim of the network interpretation is that the reputation of a person resides within the social system. At the same time, constructs such as the self-concept, social selves, and tactics of reputation management can be formulated as reputation-relevant elements of the personality system. At the theoretical level, this chapter demonstrates that a generic model of reputational concepts can be accommodated within a variety of contemporary personality theories. This argument is illustrated by a review of the socioanalytic personality theory and the five-factor personality theory.

This is an introductory chapter, which starts with a general discussion of whether leaders’ personalities really matter in determining the outcome of democratic elections, and then considers a number of preliminary points before the country analyses are presented in the following six chapters. The first point is to differentiate between the indirect influences a leader can have on voters and an election outcome (via his influence on his political party or government or administration) and the direct influence of a candidate’s personality or personal characteristics; this book is about the latter. The second point is to define what is meant by ‘personality or personal characteristics’, and the next two points are a discussion of why leaders’ attributes might, or might not, be thought to matter. The fifth point is to suggest analytical strategies for disentangling the effects of leaders’ personalities or personal characteristics from other factors; the three advanced are the experimental, improved–prediction and counterfactual strategies. Next, previous analytical findings are presented for the six countries studied in the book (United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Russia), and finally, hypotheses are offered for explaining when the impact of candidates’ personalities or personal characteristics might be greatest.

There has been a widespread belief in Britain in recent years (which appears to be corroborated by survey evidence) that leaders’ personalities strongly influence the way that people vote and therefore the results of elections, although in a parliamentary system such as Britain’s, this is less obviously correct than in presidential systems such as the United States, France and Russia. However, British political science has usually reached negative conclusions on this belief, pointing out that popular leaders have often lost elections, and that only two of the eleven elections fought since 1964 (those of 1964 and 1997) stand out as elections in which leaders’ personalities may have been decisive. This chapter looks at the 1997 election, for which three separate studies belonging to the British Election Study are available: the cross–sectional study, XBES; the campaign study, BECS; and the British Election Panel Study, BEPS. It first discusses the effect of leaders’ personalities by constructing a series of vote models, and then looks at the relationship between leaders’ personalities and the vote. Each of the three British Election Studies are then analysed; only the BEPS study (which has the least comprehensive data set) indicates that leaders’ personalities had anything other than a marginal effect on the election outcome.

There have been only six French presidential elections between 1965 and 1995, but there has been considerable variation between these in the extent to which the candidates’ leadership attributes might have contributed to voter choice and electoral outcomes, and during the same period there has been an unusual degree of constancy in the nature and strength of the underlying social and political forces. The theme of this chapter is the collision between these two forces (transient candidate qualities and long–term electoral forces), but before this analysis is made, a brief account is given of how presidential elections are conducted in France. The main part of the chapter is an analysis of the six elections between 1965 and 1995: the 1965 de Gaulle election; the 1969 election won by Pompidou; the 1974 election won by Giscard d’Estaing; the 1981 and 1988 elections won by Mitterrand; and the 1995 election won by Chirac. Constraints on personal candidate appeal are then discussed, before presenting a further analysis of the 1988 election. The study focuses on the extent to which the traditional left–right dimension has affected the electorate’s behaviour and electoral outcome, and whether there were elections in which one candidate had a clear advantage over the other in terms of personal popularity or leadership attributes; the objective was to determine whether the left–right factor was weaker at elections where personal qualities were presumed stronger, and this hypothesis received some support from the analysis presented.

The purpose of this chapter is not to second-guess the president's decision to go to war with Iraq, but to inquire into the possibility that it represents an outstanding example of the influence of personality upon decision making of the highest importance. The chapter proceeds first by presenting a composite view of the personality of the president, taking into account both his major personality traits and his world-view. Next, it breaks down the decision for war in Iraq into seven discrete decisions. The first six progressively made war increasingly likely. The last was the final decision to launch the invasion. Each decision is characterized based on the major actors who influenced the president's choice, the manner in which the decision was made, and the practical consequences of each choice for the likelihood of war. There is compelling evidence that personal factors drove the decision to wage war in Iraq.

This chapter introduces and elaborates on the central idea that executives differ in what they personally bring to their decision-making situations and therefore differ in what they decide and how they behave. The chapter lays out a comprehensive model of how this process occurs, hinging on the executive's “orientation”—or the amalgam of experiences, values, personality, and mind-set that the executive possesses at any given point. This executive orientation limits and distorts the actual stimuli confronting the executive, such that his or her “construed reality” is a result of a three-stage filtering process: limited field of vision, selective perception, and interpretation. The chapter then addresses the psychological side of executive orientations, focusing on executive values, cognitive content and structure, and personality.

This chapter introduces the arguments for why, according to the personalists, the absolute cannot be conceived in pantheistic and impersonalistic terms. It discusses the meaning of the new concept of God as a person, and explains the personalists’ insistence that the absolute can be understood as the personal God.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a systematic test of the conventional wisdom that personality is key in contemporary American electoral politics. Using survey data from the six most recent presidential elections, the contours are examines of the candidates’ images (traits), the bases of those images in voters’ more fundamental political predispositions, and the impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personal qualities on individual voting behaviour and on aggregate election outcomes. In stark contrast with the popular conception of contemporary electoral politics as candidate–centred and image–driven, it is argued that candidates’ images are largely epiphenomenal and have only a modest impact on election outcomes. This conclusion is underlined by the analysis given of the 2000 (Bush vs. Gore) presidential election, in which the estimated impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personalities was even smaller than in the previous five elections considered here, although quite probably large enough to be decisive in an election decided by a few hundred votes in a single state.

The federal elections of 1998 were the first time in Germany that notions of personalization and presidentialization were discussed during an election; before that German voters chose, at least formally, between competing parties rather than between competing chancellor candidates, and only a minor role was accorded to the personalities and circumstances of candidates. The first part of this chapter analyses the role that voters’ orientations towards the chancellor–candidates has played in the broad context of electoral choice, paying particular attention to the influence of candidate orientations on the voting choices of people lacking any long–term party identification; this part of the analysis is based on data pertaining to all the electoral contests fought in Germany from 1961 to 1998. The second part of the chapter analyses the various components of the chancellor–candidates’ images: does the way in which voters evaluate the candidates simply reflect existing patterns of party identification, or do the voters construct their own candidate orientations by fitting separate pieces into a pattern, each of which refers to specific attributes of the candidates as perceived and evaluated by them; and are the proponents of the personalization thesis right in assuming that the candidates’ images are largely determined by the voters’ perceptions of the candidates’ personalities rather than by their performance? These questions are answered with specific reference to data collected by the 1998 German Election Study. Despite the apparent personal favouring of Schröder over Kohl in 1998, it is concluded that there is no real evidence that chancellor–candidates’ personalities and other personal characteristics play any stronger role in German voting patterns than they have in the past.

For the case of elections since 1988, this chapter looks at the suggestion made by Andre Siegfried in 1907 that Canadian elections are peculiarly vulnerable to leader effects. It begins by outlining the specifically Canadian arguments for taking leadership seriously and the evidence said to back them; the arguments are found to refer mainly to ‘indirect’ effects in the sense used by King in Chapter 1 (so that leaders are treated as embodied preferences), with the actual evidence largely silent on the content – personality or otherwise – of Canadian judgments on leaders, at least in so far as those judgments are linked to the vote. Likewise, most accounts control for competing explanations weakly, if at all, and none considers personality for its net, election–day effect. Working through each argument also reveals that each is highly contingent, generally applying more to certain parties or party sizes than others, and more to periods of flux and to new parties than to stable periods and old parties. Filling the gaps requires an account of the personality factors worth taking seriously (the analysis looks at competence and character), a basic estimation strategy setting these attributes into proper context (which is given), and based on this estimation strategy, an accounting for net aggregate effects (also given). The last two sections of the chapter discuss whether perceptions of personality can be modified over the course of a campaign, and give an account of a special sort of ‘indirect’ effect: the case where perceptions of a leader’s personality can be cashed in on perceptions of a policy option (here the proposal for a commercial union between Canada and the United States in 1988).

Discusses contemporary liberalism's meaning, character, and justification. Section 1.1 argues that three constitutive commitments define contemporary liberalism and distinguish it from other theories. Section 1.2 demonstrates that, contrary to political liberalism's claims, these three commitments are best linked by the value of autonomy. Hence, contemporary liberalism is best understood as displaying weak perfectionism. Section 1.3 analyses autonomy more carefully, developing it as a substantive notion of higher‐order preference formation within a context of cultural coherence, plural constitutive personal values and beliefs, openness to other's evaluations of oneself, and a sufficiently developed moral, spiritual or aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional personality.

This chapter focuses on Green's arguments about the role of self-consciousness in practical responsibility or moral personality. Green denies that moral responsibility is threatened by determinism and requires indeterminism. He believes that indeterminism is a greater threat to responsibility, inasmuch as it is unclear why we should hold a person accountable for actions that are not due to his character. Green shows the influence of a long tradition of thinking about agency that extends back to the Greeks and is given forceful articulation by moderns, such as Butler, Reid, and Kant.