When Do Leader Attributes Matter? Evidence from the President's Daily Brief

• In Event: New Research on Leaders in International Politics

Abstract

Research on the personal backgrounds of political leaders has exploded recently. This emerging research agenda, sometimes called the “leader attribute school” or the “personal biography approach,” compellingly shows that pre-tenure leader attributes influence political outcomes. But scholars have not yet explored fully the far-reaching implications of the research agenda’s findings. Specifically, if leader attributes really can predict political outcomes with some degree of confidence, then a leader’s background is not just relevant for explaining the leader’s behavior—it should also shape how others perceive the leader. We therefore flip the analytical lens typically used in the personal biography literature by considering the following questions: Do foreign actors pay attention to leader attributes? And if so, when?

We argue that intelligence officials in one state focus on a foreign leader’s attributes to the extent that this information helps resolve uncertainty about how the leader might behave. Given this, we expect that leader attributes will be uniquely informative during leadership transitions. Just before or after a new leader takes power, intelligence officials face a high degree of uncertainty about the incoming regime’s foreign policy. During transitions, officials are uncertain because they have not yet observed the new foreign leader make any decisions as head of state. They consequently look for clues about how that leader will govern. Intelligence officials rely on leader attributes during these periods of uncertainty because personal traits are useful heuristics that provide some information—albeit imperfect information—about how the new leader is likely to behave. But once the new ruler builds a track record in office, intelligence officials quickly discount the leader’s pre-tenure attributes because they can instead evaluate the leader’s behavior directly. In short, leader attributes serve as a substitute for an observable track record during leadership transitions.

To test our argument, we exploit 4,991 recently declassified daily reports from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the American president between 1961 and 1977: the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). For the 416 non-American world leaders who entered office during the period for which the PDB is declassified, we code the specific days on which the PDB mentions any of the main attributes that prior work on political leadership suggests are important (factors such as age, education, occupation, political and military experiences, and so forth). In line with our argument, we find that the PDB commonly discusses foreign leader attributes right before new rulers take office and during their earliest days in power. Yet, as our theory expects, attention to foreign leader attributes is short lived: the PDB almost never reports on attributes after a ruler’s first month in office. We also conduct a battery of supplementary tests—including multiple placebo tests and an analysis of cross-case (rather than over-time) variation in the PDB’s attention to leader attributes—to rule out plausible alternative explanations for our results.

Authors

• Michael Goldfien, Yale University

• Michael Frederick Joseph, George Washington University

• Daniel Krcmaric, Northwestern University