Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization

by Fred I. Greenstein

Overview

It is widely recognized that politics often is profoundly shaped by the personalities of the actors in the political process. Yet the scholarly literature on "personality and politics" is one of the most vexed, controversial, and methodologically gnarled bodies of inquiry in the social sciences. The author of this book, an acknowledged authority in the field, attempts to lay out conceptual and methodological standards for carrying out personality-and-politics inquiries--ranging from psychological case studies of single actors, through multi-case analyses of types of political actors, to aggregative analyses of the impact of individuals and types of individuals on political systems and processes. For the Norton Library edition, Professor Greenstein has written an introduction dealing with current issues and examples.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393007671
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/1975
Series:	The Norton Library ; N767
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

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Personality and Politics

Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization

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By Fred I. Greenstein

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07731-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Study of Personality and Politics

The full title of this book provides the most convenient brief statement of its concern: problems of evidence, inference, and conceptualization in the study of personality and politics. Putting it less grandly, I shall be discussing how one can analyze the political consequences that result from personal characteristics of political actors. How should students of politics think about such matters? What kinds of evidence should they gather? How can they muster that evidence to reach fruitful conclusions? Stated dogmatically, and defended more fully in the remainder of the chapter, here is the line of reasoning that has led me to this particular investment of effort.

1. My most primitive assumption is that politics frequently is influenced in important ways by factors that are commonly summarized by the term "personality." I am regularly struck by how, as one's perspective on political activity becomes closer and more detailed, the political actors begin to loom as full-blown individuals who are influenced in politically relevant ways by the various strengths and weaknesses to which the human species is subject. Viewed in proximity, political participants present themselves as something considerably more than can be indicated by the impersonal categories students of politics ordinarily use to explain political behavior — as more than role-players, creatures of situation, members of cultures, and possessors of social characteristics, such as occupation, class, sex, and age.

2. It follows that the study of personality and politics ought to be a systematically developed subdivision of political science, occupying the skill and energy of numerous workers.

3. The study of personality and politics is, in fact, not a thriving scholarly endeavor. A principal reason is that the scholars who study politics do not feel equipped to analyze personality in ways that meet their intellectual standards. Personality tends to remain the preserve of journalists. This is unfortunate, since what the student of politics leaves to the journalist is not only of frequent political importance, but also is complexly elusive — hence especially in need of the kind of reflective examination that appropriately equipped scholars can provide.

4. The most fundamental item of scholarly equipment in this area consists simply of the capacity to think clearly about the kinds of issues that arise in the existing personality-and-politics literature.

5. But that literature is formidably gnarled — empirically, methodologically, conceptually, and even in the degree to which there is agreement that such a literature ought to exist. Indeed, the presence of a literature labeled "personality and politics" — a fascinating, but tangled array of efforts — is one of the paradoxical deterrents to the development of the field.

6. Ergo, if some of the tangle can be unraveled and if paths to satisfactory inquiry can be identified, it is possible that controversy will be defused and channeled into constructive inquiry.

I. MATTERS OF DEFINITION

The Meaning of "Personality" to Psychologists

For an initial indication of the degree and nature of the tangle we need do no more than attempt to define "personality and politics." Mainly because of the ambiguity of its first term, the phrase lacks uniform meaning. There are differences within psychology over what is meant by "personality," and, furthermore, the term tends to have different connotations to political scientists than it has to psychologists. As long as one is clear about one's usage in particular contexts, nothing is gained by striving for a canonical definition. But clarity is served by being aware of the range of usages, and a brief definitional discussion has the further advantage of beginning to lay out in fuller detail some of the problems that shall concern us.

The psychologists themselves have been chronically unable to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of "personality." A standard discussion by Allport lists no less than fifty types of definitions. This definitional pluralism results, to a considerable extent, from one of the basic problems for workers in this area: the continuing diversity of personality theories and, therefore, of the number and nature of terms used by different commentators to characterize individual psychological make-up.

The degree of theoretical anarchy within psychology can easily be exaggerated, however. Although theorists populate their definitions with different nomenclature, it is frequently the case that one theoretical vocabulary can readily be translated into another. Furthermore, there is general agreement among psychologists about the standing of the term "personality." Its referent is to an inferred entity rather than to a directly observable phenomenon. "Personality" refers to a construct that is introduced to account for the regularities in an individual's behavior as he responds to diverse stimuli.

Adjusting for differences of nomenclature and nuance, one also finds much consensus among psychologists on the separable components of personality. Personality theorists posit "structures" that are adapted to screening reality (cognition), to expressing feelings (affect), and to relating the self to others (identification). On the other hand, there is less consensus about the degree to which a personality theory ought to stress the aspects of inner life that have traditionally interested clinical psychologists and others who claim Freud as part of their intellectual heritage — especially the processes of ego-defense. These are the means through which individuals, often without realizing it, adapt their behavior to the need to manage their inner conflicts. And there is also less agreement about the degree to which theories should emphasize as a principal part of personality the closer-to-the-surface psychological dispositions that are widely studied by political scientists — namely, attitudes and all the related psychological orientations that are the regular grist of the mills of survey research.

The Meaning of "Personality" to Political Scientists

Whatever may be the specific features he considers important, the psychologist's usage ordinarily is comprehensive. For him "personality" subsumes all important psychic regularities. Political scientists, however, appear to assign it a much more restricted meaning, or so one may infer contextually from numerous statements in the political-science literature about the relevance to political behavior of the typically undefined (and reified) entity to which they assign the label "personality." First of all, the political scientist's usage ordinarily excludes political attitudes. Secondly, political scientists often further contract the term to refer to the layers of the psyche in the clinician's traditional domain — inner conflict and the ego defenses and their manifestations.

In equating "personality" with ego defense and "personality and politics" with the effects of personal psychopathology on political behavior, the political scientist accurately identifies a persisting, if controversial, strand in political and social analysis. The potential relevance for political analysis of Freud's categories and hypotheses was first explored in detail for a political science audience in 1930 by Harold D. Lasswell in his Psychopathology and Politics. By that date Lasswell was able to point to numerous efforts by psychoanalysts (including Freud himself) to view politics through their intellectual lenses. And there have been many post-1930 attempts to explain politics and other large-scale social phenomena in depth psychological terms: sweeping macro-formulations about politics and society by writers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown; work in the culture-and-personality, national character tradition of Benedict, Gorer and Mead; attempts to use clinical psychological notions to explain conflict among nations; plus such less global enterprises as the very many quantitative studies of the imperfectly understood psychological syndrome labeled "authoritarianism," psychological biographies of public figures, and clinical case-studies of members of the general population. It is of these diverse enterprises, rather than, for example, the literature on the psychology of voting, that political scientists tend to think when they refer to personality and politics.

The Usage and Focus of This Work

My focus in what follows is in part on depth psychology and the analysis of politics. Many social scientists would dismiss this as even a partial concern. The disadvantages of considering depth psychological issues are suggested by the great volume of polemical and clarificatory literature on psychoanalysis that continues to pour out even now. Yet one can accept the many demonstrations of the chaotic logical and empirical standing of psychoanalytic concepts and propositions but nevertheless feel it vital not to lose sight of the phenomena to which these concepts and propositions are addressed. For political depth psychologists may have a point when they argue that much political behavior — for example, much of the "irrationality" which often seems so luxuriant in politics — may have ego-defensive origins. And as long as this possibility exists, it is desirable to clarify the standards for accepting and rejecting hypotheses that explain political behavior in these terms.

My attention to ego-defensive processes is, however, only an aspect of a broader interest in personality, in the comprehensive psychologist's sense of the totality of more or less stable personal psychological characteristics. Like most political scientists, when I employ the word "personality," I tend not to be referring to straightforward political attitudes. And by and large, this book does not discuss the principal issues in the study of attitudes, if only because this aspect of political psychology is already rather well developed, especially as it relates to electoral behavior. I tend instead to apply "personality" to the broad gamut of non-political psychological attributes which lead us to conclude that people are, for example, out-going, hostile, or phlegmatic — or that they have other, perhaps more complex, personal qualities. But part of my argument is that we need to be wary of such restrictive connotations, since, as we shall see, many of the standard difficulties in the political personality literature come from the failure to think in a sufficiently broad way about the full configuration of psychological and non-psychological determinants of political behavior. Moreover, much of what needs to be said about the effect on politics of personality in any of the more restricted senses applies broadly to the political consequences of psychological variables in general. This is so emphatically the case that henceforth I shall use such phrases as "political psychology," "political personality," and "personality and politics" interchangeably, making finer distinctions only when necessary.

II. THE NEED FOR SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF PERSONALITY AND POLITICS

We may now consider in more detail the undefended assertion that there is need for a systematically developed personality-and-politics literature. Fifty-some years ago, Walter Lippmann observed that "to talk about politics without reference to human beings ... is just the deepest error in our political thinking." This would appear both on formal and on empirical grounds to be an unassailable assertion no matter which of the two standard kinds of definitions of "politics" we use. We can treat as political all of the activities that go on in and around government. Or we can, in Lasswell's usage, define the term "functionally" to refer to some distinctive pattern of behavior that may manifest itself in any of the conventionally designated institutional settings — for example, the exercise of power and influence, efforts to resolve conflict resolution, or, in David Easton's often quoted phrase, "authoritative allocations of values." By either tack, politics is a matter of human behavior, and behavior, in the formulation of Kurt Lewin and many others, is a function of both the environmental situations in which actors find themselves and the psychological predispositions they bring to those situations.

There is of course nothing novel in the assertion that behavior is a consequence of the actor's environment and his psychological dispositions. Yet this assertion is so fundamental to an appreciation of why psychological evidence frequently is essential for political analysis that it deserves to be dwelled upon. Consider the following statement of the point by Lazarus in his textbook:

The sources of man's behavior (his observable action) and his subjective experience (such as thoughts, feelings, and wishes) are twofold: the external stimuli that impinge on him and the internal dispositions that result from the interaction between inherited physiological characteristics and experience with the world. When we focus on the former, we note that a person acts in such-and-such a way because of certain qualities in a situation. For example, he attacks a friend because the friend insulted him, or he loses interest in a lecture because the teacher is dull or uninformed, or he fails in his program of study because the necessity of supporting himself through school leaves insufficient time for studying. It is evident that a man's behavior varies greatly from moment to moment, from circumstance to circumstance, changing with the changing conditions to which he is exposed.

Still, even as we recognize the dependency of behavior on outside stimuli, we are also aware that it cannot be accounted for on the basis of the external situation alone, but that in fact it must arise partly from personal characteristics.

One is immediately able to proliferate examples of political events that were critically dependent upon the personal characteristics of key actors, or of actors in the aggregate. Take Republican politics in 1964. An account of the main determinants of the Republican Presidential nomination that year and of the subsequent election campaign would have to include much more than descriptions of the personal characteristics of the party leaders and members. But any account would be incomplete that did not acknowledge the impact of such factors as the willingness of one of the strongest contenders for the nomination to divorce his wife and marry a divorced woman; the indecisiveness of the party's elder statesman; the emotional proclivities that produced a politically damaging outburst of temper in a news conference (two years earlier) by the man who had been the party's 1960 Presidential candidate; the self-defeating political style of the man who received the 1964 nomination (his unwillingness to placate his opponents within the party, his propensity to remind voters of the issues on which he was most vulnerable); and countless more unpuzzling, but no less psychologically important aspects of the actions of the protagonists. Not to mention psychological factors that had their effect through the aggregation of the behavior of many less visible actors: for example, the psychologies of voters in the Republican primaries of that year and of delegates to the national convention.

Attempts to explain the outcomes of adversary relationships often place in particularly clear relief the need for psychological data. For example, the overwhelming defeat in 1967 of numerically superior, better-equipped Arab armies by Israel quite obviously was a function of gross discrepancies between the levels of skill and motivation of the two sides, both among leaders and subordinates. A further example — one which lays out with a rather grim clarity the possible life-or-death policy relevance of reliable knowledge of the inner tendencies of political actors — is provided by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This event can usefully be discussed in some detail, not only in its own right, but also in terms of an academic debate of more than "academic" significance that broke out in its midst.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Personality and Politics by Fred I. Greenstein. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface to New Edition, pg. v
• Acknowledgements, pg. xix
• Contents, pg. xxiii
• Introduction, pg. xxvii
• CHAPTER ONE : THE STUDY OF PERSONALITY AND POLITICS, pg. 1
• CHAPTER TWO: OBJECTIONS TO THE STUDY OF PERSONALITY AND POLITICS, pg. 33
• CHAPTER THREE: PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF SINGLE POLITICAL ACTORS, pg. 63
• CHAPTER FOUR: PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TYPES OF POLITICAL ACTORS, pg. 94
• CHAPTER FIVE: AGGREGATIVE EFFECTS OF PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS ON POLITICAL SYSTEMS, pg. 120
• CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUDING REMARKS, pg. 141
• A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE, pg. 154
• AUTHOR INDEX, pg. 185
• SUBJECT INDEX, pg. 191