No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Profiling the personality of populist foreign policy makers: a leadership trait analysis
Abstract
The burgeoning research into the impact of populism on foreign policy mostly revolves around polarising chief executives, but has still paid little attention to the personality attributes characterising leading agents of populism such as Chávez, Erdoğan, or Trump. The paper therefore uses leadership trait analysis (LTA) to explore to what extent the thoughts and actions of populist foreign policy agency are rooted in particular individual predispositions. As a theoretical contribution, the conceptual tenets of the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism are systematically connected to the personality traits contained in LTA. The developed expectations are empirically tested by profiling a sample of eight populist government leaders from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Overall mixed results indicate that conceptual distinctions between populist and non-populist leaders are not fully reflected at the personality level. Even so, some traits such as high self-confidence and high distrust of others could indeed provide fertile ‘individual ground’ for the observable impact of populism on foreign policy making.
... This is particularly the case in the edited volume of Frank Stengel et al. (2019) , which examines in-depth the cross-regional drivers and patterns of populism, as well as the special issues coordinated by Vedi Hadiz and Angelos Chryssogelos ( 2017 ), Amy Skonieczny and Amentahru Wahlrab (2019) , Sandra Destradi, David Cadier, and Johaness Plagemann (2021) , Georg Löfflmann (2022 . Several pioneering works that questioned the scope and nature of the populist dimension in foreign policy contributed to this direction, such as the articles of Angelos Chryssogelos (2017) (2020) , Özgür Özdamar and Erdem Ceydilek (2020 ), Christian Lequesne (2021) , Consuelo Thiers and Leslie Wehner (2022) , and Stephan Fouquet and Klaus Brummer (2023) , among many others. ...
... A third school of PFP lies in the definition of populism as a type of leadership style. It places its focus on the ways in which leaders perform diplomacy, thus matching the study of the different personality forms adopted by populist leaders in the implementation of foreign policy, the underlying cultural, psychological, and instrumental roots, and their political implications (see Wehner and Thies 2014 ;Özdamar and Ceydilek 2020 ;Thiers and Wehner 2022 ;Fouquet and Brummer 2023 ). Certainly, there are strong links between populists' personalization and the two patterns presented above (politicization and centralization); nevertheless, despite the apparent overlapping between this school and the previous one, their approaches are different: While PFP-2 addresses decision-making processes within governments, PFP-3 evaluates links between leaders' psychological characteristics and PFP performances. ...
... Certainly, IR scholars have made substantial empirical advances in uncovering the particularities of PFP in multiple countries around the world. However, large-N cross-sectional studies of PFP in countries from different regions are still in their infancy (see, for instance, Özdamar and Ceydilek 2020 ;Söderbaum, Spandler, and Pacciardi 2021 ;Fouquet and Brummer 2023 ;Wojczewski 2023 ). Even more so when comparing the different regions in terms of PFP, that is, adopting a regional perspective (see Yilmaz and Morieson 2022 ;Giurlando and Wajner 2023 ). ...
This article reviews one of the expanding research programs in International Relations (IR): the study of populist foreign policy (PFP). Recent years have witnessed a significant proliferation of IR scholars researching the nexus between the global rise of populism and their foreign policies across different countries, regions, and subfields. However, scientific progress at such stage of this research program demands an in-depth "mapping" of its different ontological approaches. To this end, we identify and explore five different "schools" of PFP that have been consolidated in the last decade, while highlighting their accomplishments in understanding the distinctive populist elements in foreign policy and their possibilities of analyzing local and external conditions under which PFP impacts global politics. We also set the stage for future contributions on the drivers, patterns, and effects of PFP, under the assumption that the populist phenomenon and its transnational dimensions will continue to affect IR prospects for a long time to come.
... The recognition within international relations (IR) scholarship that populism is not exclusively a phenomenon of domestic politics has led to the proliferation of research on populist foreign policy, with a wide geographical and theoretical scope (see Wajner and Giurlando 2024). The research program includes attempts to understand what populism means for multiple foreign policy issues, including trade (Milner 2019;Skonieczny 2019), diplomacy (Lequesne 2021;Wehner and Thies 2020), international organizations (Copelovitch and Pevehouse 2019;Resende 2021;Söderbaum, Spandler, and Pacciardi 2021;Voeten 2020), regional integration (Wajner 2021;Yilmaz 2023), global communications (Boucher and Thies 2019;Lacatus and Meibauer 2022;Moffitt 2016), policymakers beliefs (De Sá Guimarães and De Oliveira Silva 2021; Fouquet and Brummer 2023;Ostermann and Stahl 2022;Özdamar and Ceydilek, 2020), and security (Biegon 2020;Jenne 2021;Krebs 2020;Löfflmann 2019). ...
The quest for legitimacy has traditionally been intrinsic to the political phenomenon of populism, while (de-)legitimation struggles are increasingly relevant once populist leaderships take government control. However, the rich literatures on populism and legitimacy have hardly interacted and, therefore, analysis of populists’ international (de)legitimation strategies has been scarce. This chapter addresses the ways in which incorporating theoretical frameworks on legitimacy and (de)legitimation into the ideational approach can contribute to better understand the drivers, patterns, and impact of the global rise of contemporary populist leaderships, suggesting new avenues for research on the potential international mitigation of populism.
... These traits help identify whether the leader finds crises to be urgent matters that deserve fast response because they measure the leader's tendencies to find their environment (and the people around them) dangerous, harmful, or unsafe. DIS captures the leader's tendency to be suspicious of others' behavior ( Foster and Keller 2014 ;Fouquet and Brummer 2022 ). 5 Hermann (2003 , 203) explains that leaders with high levels of DIS view others as "competitors" who have "ulterior motives" that are detrimental to their well-being. ...
Why were some countries faster than others at introducing COVID-19 mitigation policies? Existing research shows that leaders are central to defining and making sense of crises, which then shapes their governments’ crisis response. I argue that crisis-sense-making depends on leaders’ personality traits pertaining to how they perceive their power status, collect and process information, and interact with their environment, subsequently influencing their governments’ crisis response speed. I test this argument in the context of the European experience with COVID-19, combining an original Leadership Traits Analysis dataset of thirty-two leaders with the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data. I show that leaders who were highly self-confident or exhibited a tendency to challenge constraints were significantly slower at introducing pandemic mitigation policies. Leaders who were open to information were significantly faster to do so. I also show that policy emulation between countries over time dissipated the slowing effects of the leaders’ need for power and conceptual complexity on response speed. The results present new and systematic evidence on how leader personality shaped pandemic policy-making, contributing to the literature on crisis policy-making and political leadership. They also offer science advisors food for thought on how to communicate with leaders.
... Ukraine's fi ght against Russian aggression has refl ected the peculiarities and contradictions of global processes. This has stimulated the renewal of existing alliances and institutions, the creation of new ones, the adjustment of priorities, partnership relations, the adoption of compromises, and so on (Kempe, 2022;Fouquet & Brummer, 2023). ...
The objective of this research is to examine the social changes in European countries resulting from the Russian war against Ukraine and to understand their implications for the future functioning of social institutions. The research is grounded in the theoretical framework that recognizes the significant impact of the war in Ukraine on various aspects of European societies, including emotional state, daily life, public opinion, interpersonal relationships, socio-economic status, employment, and public activity. The study aims to identify and analyze the main trends of social changes in European countries in response to the war. The research utilizes the analytic-bibliographic method to review relevant scientific literature on social changes in European countries over the past year. Additionally, it employs various analytical methods such as induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis of information, systemic-structural, comparative, logical-linguistic methods, as well as abstraction and idealization for data study and processing. An online survey conducted by the researchers was used to gather practical insights on key questions related to changes in the social status quo in Europe due to the resolution of the war in Ukraine. The research findings highlight the most important theoretical aspects of societal development trends in European countries affected by the war in Ukraine. It also investigates the perspectives of scientists and sociologists studying the international social sphere regarding critical aspects of this issue. The conclusion drawn from the research provides a comprehensive understanding of the social changes that have occurred in European countries as a result of the war in Ukraine. This research contributes to the broader understanding of the far-reaching impacts of the Russian war against Ukraine on European societies. The implications of this research can guide post-war European society research and aid in planning transformative changes to address the societal shifts brought about by the conflict.
... A recent article by Fouquet and Brummer on "populist foreign policy" came to the conclusion, for example, that "conceptual distinctions between populist and non-populist leaders are not fully reflected at the personality level" and indeed required considerable stretching to find any relevant connection between individual personality traits and specific foreign policy outcomes. 79 The problems of conceptual stretching and the misidentification of appropriate levels of analysis to which one deploys such concepts is at the core of why we can stand firm at the level of description, yet fall hard when it comes to ontological, agential-intentional, or causal analysis. These are old problems, and ones that we must be perpetually reminded of, especially as the churn of world history continues onward. ...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Two decades after Hay’s classification of political economy research, not much has changed. Interests, institutions, and ideas continue to dominate, especially in international political economy (IPE) scholarship. Despite calls for more actor-centred and psychological approaches, the individual remains a missing ‘I’ in most IPE research. This paper advances the fourth ‘I’ in IPE by drawing on psychological work in foreign policy analysis (FPA) and demonstrating the utility of personality analysis in accounting for ways that political leaders manage integrated national economies. We use corporate taxation and tax competition as our illustrative case study, focusing in particular on the different ways leaders in Ecuador and Peru responded to windfall profits during the 2003–2013 commodities boom. We argue that interests, institutions, and ideas do not completely account for variation in the taxation of windfall profits in these countries and we employ leadership trait analyses of Presidents Correa and Humala to provide the missing link. Our results suggest personality differences, when combined with contextualised understandings of the pressures that leaders face, best explain their different approaches. Overall, the paper points to the profits of including personality in IPE and forges stronger links between IPE and FPA research.
Paradoxically, research on the international dimensions and effects of populism finds that populist leaders’ politicization frequently portrays domestic and foreign “elites” as intertwined—but that their decision-making tends to be considerably more antagonistic vis-à-vis internal opponents than established external actors. Combining structural and agential perspectives, this paper unboxes the individual micro-factors feeding into this paradox by analytically disentangling domain-specific personality traits. To explore whether populist leaders’ individual characteristics vary or remain stable in domestic politics and foreign policy, we conduct a novel domain-specific leadership trait analysis of eleven populist chief executives around the globe. On the one hand, we find limited and rather heterogeneous variation in most individual characteristics, including need for power and conceptual complexity. On the other hand, the great majority of profiled leaders display higher foreign self-confidence and higher domestic distrust. We conclude that particular tendencies toward fearful blanket suspicions of other powerful internal actors and more self-assured case-by-case judgments of external counterparts matter to understand why populist decision-makers often produce confrontational domestic but relatively cooperative foreign policy records. These personality-level inferences support recent IR scholarship about the international opportunities for populist leadership, personalistic foreign policy decision-making, and the primarily domestic logic of intermestic “people-versus-elite” politicization.
Many populist leaders politicise disputes with external financial ‘elites’, but most are forced by economic pressures to fundamentally change their ‘people-versus-elite’ problem representations and ‘concede defeat’. Notable exceptions are Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who sooner or later resisted strong push-back and defied the IMF or distressed-debt funds. These instances of prolonged populist defiance differ widely across commonly used structural and agential explanatory factors at international, domestic, and individual levels. To explain how Orbán, Kirchner, and Erdoğan managed to ‘beat the elite’, this paper clusters several root causes into a parsimonious framework of two intervening variables. The temporality of strong ‘elite’ push-back and the openness of advisory systems are theorised as shaping distinct cognitive mechanisms of representational continuity or change, through which ‘people-versus-elite’ input is either preserved until – or discarded before – feeding into decision outputs. As the two-by-two matrix of early/later external shocks and open/closed inner circles explains, Orbán did not move beyond marginal representational adjustments; Kirchner’s contingent representational fluidity benefited from opportune situational developments; and Erdoğan defied significant socio-economic cost with fundamental representational continuity. These insights highlight the potential of studying populism at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and international political economy.
Populism is often assumed to undermine the liberal world order, but this claim has never been tested systematically. In this study, we do so for the first time. Based on an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” entailing anti-elitism and people-centrism, we expect populist governments to have foreign policy preferences opposed to the core features of the US-led liberal international order. Our empirical analysis assesses government preferences on the liberal international order as expressed through UN General Assembly votes. Our findings support the expectation that populism has a strong and statistically significant negative impact on foreign policy preferences related to the core norms of the liberal international order. Moreover, we find that populists with a left-wing ideology and those in less democratic countries tend to be more opposed to the US-led liberal international order. However, populist governments do not reject the UNGA as such, as they are not more likely to be absent from UNGA votes than other states. Thereby, this study makes a contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the international implications of populism and to debates on the crisis of the liberal order.
With the global rise to power of populist leaders over the past decade, research on populism, including its international implications, has flourished. However, we still lack a nuanced understanding of the international effects of this new populist wave. The special section that this article introduces seeks to bridge this gap by systematically examining three types of international effects of populism. One group of contributions addresses the impact of populism on the processes of foreign policy-making in countries governed by populists (politics). Another group focuses on effects in terms of foreign policy agenda and its substantive outcomes (policies). A third group of contributions studies the impact of populism on states' stances towards international institutions (international polity). This introduction proposes a theoretical framework that takes into account the existent diversity among populist governments, specifically addressing how the more or less authoritarian character of populism explains variations in international outcomes across politics, policies and polities. A better understanding of these varied characters and effects can contribute new insights to lively debates about the potential challenges posed by populism and populists in the contemporary international order, and the prospects for mitigation.
Introduction: There are State policies that can contribute to increasing the participation of women in public life, one of which is the gender quotas implemented by some countries in this century. The idea that women and men have the same capacityto occupy leadership positions deserves a study of the conditions in which they access management positions. Objective: To describe the participation of women in the ministerial cabinets of the six democratically elected presidents in Latin America. Methodology: Qualitative-descriptive, based on documentary analysis. Results:The ministerial cabinets described were characterized by a relatively low presence of women, with high participation as in the case of Costa Rica, and low in Nicaragua. In addition, it was found that the duration of the ministers in their positions on average wasshort and that the ministries in which they were appointed are mostly not the ones with the greatest visibility and importance due to their performance. Conclusions: Female participation in female presidents’ cabinets was relatively weak due to the preferencethat continues to exist for male leaders.
Securitization and desecuritization demonstrate how threat (de)constructions can lead to conflictual or cooperative foreign policies. However, due to its focus on collectivities, securitization theory cannot tell us why leaders choose either securitization or desecuritization. Understanding this choice is crucial because (de)securitization processes can prescribe possible foreign policy options and thus affect the likelihood of conflict and cooperation. To account for leaders’ choices, I draw on political psychology and demonstrate the utility of my approach through an explanation of two US presidents’ preferences for (de)securitizing North Korea. Using leadership trait and operational code analysis, I show that psychological variables shaped Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s preferences because they affected their threat perception and inclination toward conflictual or cooperative actions. These preferences had substantial consequences: While Clinton’s desecuritization attempt led to improvements in US–North Korean relations, Bush’s effort to resecuritize North Korea effectively reversed this progress.
Populist politics in Southern Europe displays several distinctive patterns related to a shared history, geography, culture, and economy, while being subject to similar geopolitical pressures. In the last decade, moreover, the Euro-Mediterranean region has been struck by destabilizing shocks: the Eurozone crisis and the refugee crisis, which led to a realignment of party politics, with populist parties of both the left and the right enjoying high levels of popular support and taking, or have gotten close to taking, governmental power. These patterns make Southern Europe an interesting case for the study of populism and foreign policy through a (sub-)regional comparative approach. This article applies a structured, focused comparison of the populist foreign policies (PFP) of France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, seeking to explain how populist leaderships have shaped foreign policy in these countries and the conditions under which their PFP were translated into action. After putting Euro-Mediterranean populism in context, we examine four structural themes of catalysts or constraints that populists face when ‘navigating’ PFP around the European Mare Nostrum: international power distribution, ideological underpinnings, domestic political system, and policy domains. The comparative analysis reveals how; while, populist performances are often aimed at executing a rupture and, as a result, gaining legitimacy, the implementation of PFP in Southern Europe has ultimately been affected by structural pressures to discard these revolutionary impulses and align with the mainstream.
Who speaks for ‘the people’? Populists across the globe have mobilised this question to attack liberal institutions, political opponents, and the democratic process itself, communicating a political reality in which globalist elites have allegedly betrayed the sovereign will of the popular community. The recent ‘surge’ (Mudde, 2016) or ‘wave’ (Aslanidis, 2016) of populism around the world has encompassed electorally successful right-wing populist leaders in the Northern Hemisphere such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Jaroslav Kaczynski, Recyp Erdogan, and Victor Orbán, who have advanced nationalist, exclusionary, protectionist and Eurosceptic political agendas. In parallel, left-wing populists in Greece, Spain and Bolivia have attracted voters disillusioned with neoliberal economic policies and existing representational mechanisms of liberal democracy with anti-elitist and anti-globalist platforms. In the Southern Hemisphere, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Yoweri Museveni are oft-cited examples of contemporary populist leaders who have enjoyed continued electoral success with agendas promoting ethnocultural and religious-Nationalist slogans in post-colonial contexts. Prior analyses of these populists’ electoral success and political leadership have usually focused on the ideas, ideologies and strategies populism encompasses, especially in the domestic political arena.
This chapter approaches shocks from a vantage point that is different from the one commonly found in the foreign policy analysis (FPA) literature on foreign policy change. This literature typically conceptualizes shocks as one of several opportunities for or even drivers of policy change. Contrary to this predominant approach in the FPA literature, this chapter analyzes shocks not as drivers of and opportunities for external reorientations (hence as independent variable) but as consequences of—and potential constraints for the success of—attempted policy change (hence as intervening variable). In so doing, the chapter also contributes to the exploration of inhibitors of foreign policy modifications, which have received considerably less attention in the literature than the examination of possible drivers of change.KeywordsEconomic shockForeign policy changePopulist leadership
This paper seeks to advance the study of the nexus of populism and foreign policy by showing the connection between the personality traits of the leader and the foreign policy behavior of the state that they represent. It focuses on the political personality profiles of two populist leaders who can be characterized as antiplural, Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump, as a way to empirically further substantiate the recent research agenda on populism in world politics. The paper builds the two populist leaders’ political profiles through the use of the leader trait analysis approach. It contends that there are patterns in populist leaders’ personalities that can act as key drivers of their noncooperative and conflict-inducing behavior in foreign policy. The results show the characteristics that appear as the strongest predictors of their behavior in the international arena are their low task orientation and high focus on relationships.
There is a general scholarly consensus that populist governments undermine liberal democracy at home, but less agreement over how they behave abroad. While many scholars still subscribe to the view that populism has no consistent impact on foreign policy, we argue that populist leaders engage in a characteristic set of behaviors calculated to elevate the state’s status on the international stage. However, the mechanism by which populist elite-versus people rhetoric translates into concrete foreign policy action remains underspecified. To address this gap, we develop a model showing how populism serves as a political argument to enable status elevation on the international stage. To illustrate this mechanism in action, we analyze the foreign policy rhetoric and behavior of the 2010–2020 Fidesz governments in Hungary, showing how populist argumentation was used to justify revisionist foreign policy through (1) the politicization of diplomatic machinery, (2) confrontation with traditional allies, and (3), the pursuit of more flexible partnerships. In these three respects, we show how populist arguments were used by Orbán to achieve a revolution in Hungarian foreign affairs.
There is a growing scholarly consensus that overreaching heads of government are subverting democracies across the globe. However, the characteristics of these leaders remain unclear. This article examines a type of overreaching presidential behavior that has been commonplace in Latin America: between 1945 and 2012, 25 presidents from 14 countries tried to change their respective constitutions to increase their powers. Building on personality research and semi-structured interviews conducted with former presidents, this article proposes that risk-taking and assertive leaders are more likely to try to increase their powers. Using a novel database, I conduct discrete-time duration models to test the hypotheses on the presidents that governed from 1945-2012. The results demonstrate that the personalities of presidents are a strong force behind their attempts to consolidate their authority. These findings challenge current approaches in presidential studies and have implications for the study of all types of political elites.
Studies of demand-side populism with a focus on attitudinal and behavioral factors are becoming more popular, but only a few have explored the phenomenon's psychological determinants. We tackle the lack of conversation between populism scholars and political psychologists and test the impact of conspiracy beliefs, moral disengagement, need for cognition, and belief in simple solutions on populist attitudes. We use the most widespread ideational definition in an attempt to bring clarity to demand-side populism, as the literature often conflates the concept of populism with adjacent ideological and psychological factors. We analyze representative samples from two very different countries (Italy and Turkey) to test our hypotheses. We use two of the most often-used measures of populist attitudes and also explore populism's individual building blocks: people-centrism, antielitism, and a Manichean worldview. We consistently find conspiracy beliefs (and our control variable of institutional trust) as primary sources of populist attitudes, whereas the impact of the other psychological factors is more dependent on context and operationalization. Our article calls for more conceptual clarity, careful theorization, and more work on the refinement of available survey measures. We also highlight the importance of national contexts and the dangers of generalization based on individual country studies.
How do populists conduct foreign policy? The existing literature on populism focuses mainly on domestic patterns, and until recently the foreign dimension of populism has been largely overlooked. This paper aims to fill theoretical and empirical lacunae by mapping patterns of change and continuity in the formulation of geopolitical and economic international policy among Latin-American populist governments. Striving to conduct a systematic comparative analysis, this paper explores three waves of populist foreign policies in Latin America (classic, neoliberal, and progressive). While it is difficult to highlight a unified phenomenon, the findings reveal that several ‘unifying’ elements indeed exist: they are manifest in the tendency of such governments to jointly (re)construct transnational solidarities for legitimation purposes and to adopt economic foreign policies with a pragmatic bent. Moreover, in opposition to the two first waves of populist governments, the most recent wave has embraced personalist styles, emotional public diplomacy, and clientelist techniques with support networks abroad, thus actively projecting the domestic patterns of populism to the regional and global levels in an attempt to leverage both domestic and international legitimacy. This study offers critical lessons for IR scholarship’s increasing engagement with populism, contributing to the lively debate regarding the rise of populist trends across the globe.
Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under President Erdoğan’s rule. Despite the abundant references to the ‘people’ in the populist rhetoric, it identifies personalization in foreign policy decision-making, nationalization in foreign policy implementation, and civilizationalization in the foreign policy discourse. Having established the patterns of populist foreign policy from a wider reading, this study then examines, generally, how populism has informed Turkish foreign policy and, specifically, Turkey’s approach to the recent border disputes over the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Much like his candidacy, Donald Trump’s presidency has been described as populist par excellence and as fundamentally breaking with the liberal internationalist tradition of American foreign policy. Despite a growing interest in populism and the role it has played in shaping Donald Trump’s appeal to the public at election time in 2016, we lack an understanding of how populist rhetoric after his electoral victory shaped his approach to foreign policy. This article proposes a study of President Trump’s official campaign communication through rally speeches and Twitter during the 2 months prior to the mid-term election in November 2018 as well as tweets published in the official personal account @realDonaldTrump from September to November 2018. The analysis finds that resurgent Jacksonian populism promoted by the Tea Party shapes President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Fundamentally anti-elitist, Trump’s populism opposes migration, multilateralism, and is deeply sceptical of the United States’ capacity to support a liberal global order that he perceives as detrimental to the economic interest of the American people. In addition, the analysis finds inconsistencies between his campaign discourse of non-intervention in military conflicts abroad and his foreign policy action.
This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns. Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy, but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.
This article examines President Trump's foreign policy behaviour as a product of a leadership style that is entrenched in a plutocratic worldview. We apply elements of Hermann's leadership traits framework to Trump's engagement with NATO, and characterize him as a low-conceptual complexity president, enabled by limited search for information and advice, a confrontational and insensitive approach to his environment, and proclivity to violate international norms and rules. We show that Trump's low-conceptual complexity is underpinned by a plutocratic worldview which is transactional and money-first. We argue that while this signals change between Trump and his predecessors, this plutocratic approach has been one of the most significant sources of consistency within Trump's administration. ARTICLE HISTORY
As populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.
The ‘populist phenomenon’ has received a lot of attention in recent years. Yet little is known about the populists themselves: who are they? They are often described as bad-mannered provocateurs disrupting the political game, but also as charismatic leaders able to persuade and motivate. Can a populist ‘style’ or ‘personality’ be identified? This article assesses to what extent populists score differently from ‘mainstream’ politicians on established personality inventories. Using a new dataset based on expert ratings for 152 candidates (including 33 populists) having competed in 73 elections worldwide, it is found that populists score lower on agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness. At the same time, populists score higher on extraversion, narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These results have important implications for the study of the success of populists in contemporary democracies and beyond. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
What kind of foreign policy do populists execute once in power? Based on the existing literature, we conceptualize populism as a set of ideas whose two core elements are anti-elitism and antipluralism. From this we develop a set of hypotheses regarding both substantive aspects of foreign policy as well as foreign policy–making processes of populist leaders in government. An analysis of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy record serves as a first plausibility probe of our hypotheses. We find that our concept of populism carries most explanatory value in the procedural aspects of foreign policy making as well as in its communication, less so in those aspects relating to the goals or substance of foreign policy. Whereas foreign policy under Modi's populist leadership is highly centralized and personalized, the traditional foreign policy establishment, including most notably the Ministry of External Affairs, has lost some of its previous authority. Engaging the Indian diaspora abroad emerged as another characteristic of populist foreign policy making. By contrast, the case of India does not confirm our hypothesis regarding a preference of bilateralism over multilateralism, nor does populism necessarily preclude investing in global public goods.
Populists are often identified based on their behavior, but the discursive element of their identities is also a frequently observed characteristic of this type of leader. We examine the determinants of populist foreign policy rhetoric in the case of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. We argue that a leftist populist leader like Chávez will focus on anti-imperialist themes and consider two mechanisms that may indicate the conditions under which he will use them: diversion, which would typically be expected from a populist, and capacity. We use time series analysis of rhetorical data scraped from the entire corpus of Aló Presidente— Chávez’s weekly television series- to test our hypotheses. The evidence supports the capacity mechanism, that Chávez is emboldened to use anti-imperialist rhetoric when the price of oil is high. His rhetoric thus matches his resources and ability to provide domestic and international goods to support his own identity as a protector and savior of the common people from domestic and global elites engaged in the imperialistic enterprise.
Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.
The close empirical connections between populism and nationalism have naturalised a rather misleading overlap between the concepts of populism and nationalism in academic and public debates. As a result, the relation between the two has not received much systematic attention. Drawing on the poststructuralist discourse theory originally formulated by Laclau and Mouffe, this article differentially identifies populism and nationalism as distinct ways of discursively constructing and claiming to represent “the people”, as underdog and as nation respectively. These distinct constructions of “the people” can also be identified and highlighted from a spatial or orientational perspective, by looking at the architectonics of populism and nationalism as revolving around a down/up (vertical) and an in/out (horizontal) axis respectively. Building on this framework, the article then concludes that the co-occurrence of populism and nationalism should be studied through the prism of articulation. Again, a focus on discursive architectonics allows grasping how different political projects construct different discourses by connecting the building blocks of populism and nationalism in particular ways. The study of these articulations, based on a clear distinction between populism and nationalism, is a necessary step in further deepening our understanding of the complexity and variety of populist politics.
According to some observers, populism found its ‘richest testing ground’, its ‘paradise’ in Italy in the late 1990s (Zanatta, 2002: 286). As Guy Hermet wrote, Italy ‘has transformed itself into the site par excellence of populism’s triumph over the classical parties’ (Hermet, 2001: 396). During the five years of the centre-right Berlusconi administration (2001–2006), composed of Forza Italia (FI), Alleanza Nazionale (AN), the Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e di Centro (UDC) and the Lega Nord (LN), the press has often stressed the populist character of the government and its policies.
The dominant theoretical paradigm originating in the work of Cas Mudde conceives of populism as a thin-centered ideology that focuses on the antagonism between people and elites against the backdrop of popular sovereignty. While this framework has contributed significantly to an improved scientific analysis of populism, it is argued in this article that its ideological connotations are ill-conceived both conceptually and methodologically, and that its normative implications and failure to acknowledge the graded nature of populist behavior hinder the further evolution of the field of populism studies. Combining insights from the work of Ernesto Laclau and the proponents of frame theory, the article suggests dropping the ideological clause and simply conceiving populism as a discursive frame. The article contends that frame analysis reveals a strong fit between discursive elements and cognitive features of populism, furnishing solid methodological foundations to conduct empirical research and encouraging cooperation with neighboring fields of social science.
The Greek announcement of its excessive debts led to one of the most severe crises the EU has faced since its inception. The crisis soon evolved into a full leadership crisis as European political leaders struggled to come up with a common solution to the challenges they faced. Theories of leadership and crisis management identify several factors that may contribute to these differences. This article examines to what extent leaders’
personal traits and external pressure influenced how six political leaders made sense of the situation. The study finds that a leader’s belief that they can control events, their self-confidence, as well as economic pressure provide a partial explanation of how European leaders make sense of the crisis. The traits of cognitive complexity and openness to information do not exert an influence in the cases discussed here. These findings indicate that any comprehensive understanding of how leaders make sense of crises
should take note of specific individual as well as contextual factors.
What is populism? What is the relationship between populism and democracy? Populism: A Very Short Introduction presents populism as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite,” and that privileges popular sovereignty above all else. It illustrates the practical power of this ideology by describing populist movements of the modern era—European right-wing parties, left-wing presidents in Latin America, and the Tea Party movement in the United States—and charismatic populist leaders such as Juan Domingo Péron, H. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and Hugo Chávez. Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist forces constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics.
THE GLOBAL WAVE OF POPULISM that gathered steam in the 2010s and achieved its most important victories in 2016 with the stunning Brexit referendum and the unexpected election of President Donald Trump has instilled great fear about the fate of liberal democracy across the world, even in advanced industrial countries. Observers in academia and far beyond have painted a dark picture, as symbolized by the black cover of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s best seller with the scary title How Democracies Die.¹ Indeed, high-profile cases of populist leaders who strangled democracy, ranging from Alberto Fujimori and Hugo Chávez in Latin America to Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Europe, easily come to mind. As a result, concern has been widespread and intense.²
Theoretical analyses indeed demonstrate and empirical analyses corroborate that populism seriously threatens democracy. The very definition of populism, understood here as a political strategy that revolves around personalistic, usually charismatic leadership sustained by direct, uninstitutionalized connections to a heterogeneous, amorphous, and largely unorganized mass of followers,³ suggests important risks to liberal pluralism. This agency-centered notion, which is especially useful for elucidating the political actions of populist governments and their regime effects, indicates that populism stands in fundamental tension with democracy.
Much of the revived interest in new – populist and/or authoritarian – styles of leadership has been a response to developments, initially in Europe, from the late1980s on, one aspect of which has been a renewed interest in charisma and in plebiscitary leadership. How applicable are approaches to leadership developed primarily in European political science and sociology to contemporary South and Southeast Asia? Building both on Weber’s classical account of charismatic authority, and on more recent work, we propose a relational conception of charisma as an interaction between leader and followers. This leader-follower dialectic is a key characteristic of contemporary populist politics. In order to investigate the ways in which populist leaders appeal to followers, we apply this relational conception of charisma to two Asian national cases: India under Narendra Modi and Myanmar under Aung San Suu Kyi during the – now arrested – period of transition from military rule. We shall be primarily concerned with one specific form of charisma: plebiscitary leadership.
Leaders matter in international politics. One of the main tools for assessing at-a-distance psychological characteristics of political leaders is Leadership Trait Analysis. To facilitate empirical studies, a Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for automated text analysis was developed to replace hand-coding. However, the coding scheme has been available only for English-language texts. To broaden research opportunities, this article presents a novel Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for the German language. This coding scheme allows engaging in empirical analysis based on original German language sources, thereby shedding new or different light on German foreign policy. At the same time, it contributes to moving automated content analysis beyond the English language more generally.
There has been a renaissance in the study of how the backgrounds of individual leaders affect foreign policy outcomes. Donald Trump's presidency highlights the limits of this approach. Trump's psychology is so unique, and so akin to that of a small child, that studying his background alone is insufficient to explain his decision-making. The evidence for this characterization of Trump's leadership comes not from his political opponents, but his allies, staffers and subordinates. Trump's lack of impulse control, short attention span and frequent temper tantrums have all undercut his effectiveness as president as compared to his predecessors. Nonetheless, the 45th president helps to clarify ongoing debates in American politics about the relative strength of the presidency as an institution. In particular, the powers of the presidency have become so enhanced that even comparatively weak and inexperienced leaders can execute dramatic policy shifts. The formal checks on presidential power, from the legislative, judicial and executive branches have all eroded. Similarly, the informal checks on the presidency had also degraded before Trump's inauguration. This article uses Trump's presidency—and his severe limitations as a decision-maker—to highlight the ways in which even a weak leader can affect change by holding a powerful office.
What explains a state's decision to intervene in ongoing interstate conflicts? Intervention is a risky proposition, potentially incurring audience costs if the effort is unsuccessful or if casualties and other costs mount. Various domestic political factors and features of the international environment certainly shape the risks surrounding intervention, but recent work in political psychology suggests that individual leaders’ risk-taking propensity, as measured by their locus of control (LOC), greatly influences their willingness to engage in potentially risky actions. In this paper, we examine the link between US presidents’ risk propensity and the frequency with which they intervene internationally. Our analysis of the period 1946–2001 reveals that presidents with an internal LOC are generally more likely to intervene in ongoing conflicts. Moreover, such leaders are specifically more likely to engage in unilateral interventions and those geared toward harming the interests of interstate rivals, indicating a particular predilection toward risk-taking in their decision-making surrounding interventions.
Employing a discursive understanding of populism and combing it with insights of poststructuralist international relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article examines the conceptual links between foreign policy and populist forms of identity construction, as well as the ideological force that populism can unfold in the realm of foreign policy. It conceptualizes populism and foreign policy as distinct discourses that constitute collective identities by relating Self and Other. Identifying different modes of Othering, the article illustrates its arguments with a case study on the United States under Donald Trump and shows how the Trumpian discourse has used foreign policy as a platform for the (re)production of a populist-nationalist electoral coalition. Unlike common conceptions of populism as an ideology that misrepresents reality, the article argues that the discourse develops its ideological appeal by obscuring the discursive construction of social reality and thereby promising to satisfy the subject's desire for a complete and secure identity.
Despite the significance of the subject, studies on the foreign policy preferences of European populist radical right leaders are scarce except for a handful of examples. Are European populist radical right leaders more hostile than other world leaders or comparatively friendly? Do they use cooperative or conflictual strategies to achieve their political goals? What are the leadership types associated with their strategic orientations in international relations? Using the operational code construct in this empirical study, we answer these questions and depict the foreign policy belief systems of seven European populist radical right leaders. We test whether they share a common pattern in their foreign policy beliefs and whether their foreign policy belief systems are significantly different from the norming group of average world leaders. The results indicate that European populist radical right leaders lack a common pattern in terms of their foreign policy belief systems. While the average scores of the analysed European populist radical right leaders suggest that they are more conflictual in their world views, results also show that they employ instrumental approaches relatively similar to the average group of world leaders. This article illuminates the microfoundations of strategic behaviour in international relations and arrives at conclusions about the role of European populist radical right leaders in mainstream International Relations discussions, such as idealism versus realism. In this sense, the cognitivist research school complements and advances structural accounts of international relations by analysing leadership in world affairs.
This article contributes to the emerging literature on populist foreign policy by examining President Trump’s ability to dominate and shape public discourse on trade. We develop an ideational approach to populism that focuses on the social network that emerges surrounding a populist leader’s discourse. We hypothesize that populist leaders will generate a polarized social network along the elite-versus-people divide instead of the usual partisan boundary. Populist leaders like Trump are known to prefer direct, unmediated access to the people in order to spread their ideology. We therefore examine Trump’s use of Twitter as he announced his steel and aluminum tariffs in March 2018 and its impact on the salience and content of debates around trade policy on the Twittersphere. Our findings highlight how Trump and his supporters use populist foreign policy themes to articulate their policy positions on social media. © 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
When leaders depart from their long-held, publicly known policy positions, one possible explanation is changes in their personality. This paper inquires about one example: Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Middle East observers long believed that Sharon was one of the last Israelis to cede any territory to Palestinians; alas, that became the decision to mark Sharon’s reign as prime minister. The “bulldozer” decided to evacuate the homes he had built. Assuming that Gaza disengagement implied a significant reassessment of Sharon’s previously held policy preferences, this paper asks if Sharon changed. Using leadership traits analysis, the paper develops two profiles of Sharon, before and during his premiership. Sharon is then profiled in three phases during his tenure: first term, second term until the announcement of disengagement, and until the end of his tenure. In making his decision, Sharon temporarily became a complex thinker, yet did not change in his distrust or develop empathy to the Palestinians. The findings suggest that leaders can experience a fundamental but temporary change to implement radically different decisions, and confirm that leaders’ traits are stable over time.
Political leaders appeal to home audiences as well as ‘others’ beyond. Using leadership trait analysis, in the example of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this paper questions if and why a leader can exhibit different leadership traits and styles at home and away. The paper is concerned with how Erdogan's leadership traits and style tie to Turkish foreign policy between March 2003 and May 2013. First, two profiles of Erdogan are assessed from the interviews he gave to domestic and foreign press. The paper then reports profiles of Erdogan’s by distinguishing between different Western, Eastern, European, American, and Middle Eastern audiences. Based on these profiles, this paper argues that Erdogan has two different profiles at home and away. Furthermore, it finds that Erdogan’s profile from his foreign policy interviews with the American news outlets stand out from his other profiles. Among other traits, Erdogan’s task focus changes noticeably between audience.
Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose definitional precariousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of politics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phenomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have fleshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cyclical appearances reflect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some basic agreement now exists on populism’s rhetorical character and its strategy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 11, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This article conceptualizes populism as a discourse of international relations that arises as response to state transformation, a phenomenon that encompasses changes in both state-society relations and the norms defining the appropriate practice of statehood. The current surge of populism is a response to one such transformation: the internationalization of state elites and their insulation from popular scrutiny. Populism does not simply address material and cultural dislocations that internationalization entails. Crucially, its distinct discursive logic allows these partial social demands to adopt the moral claim to representation of the ‘real people’ and so counter the universality of the international norms that underpin state transformation. Beyond the current conjuncture of state internationalization, this conceptualization accommodates iterations of populism in various regional and historical contexts of state transformation, making it a promising basis for the further comparative study of populism.
This volume illustrates the diversity of populism globally. When seeking power, populists politicize issues, and point to problems that need to be addressed such as inequalities, the loss of national sovereignty to globalization, or the rule of unresponsive political elites. Yet their solutions tend to be problematic, simplistic, and in most instances, instead of leading to better forms of democracy, their outcomes are authoritarian. Populists use a playbook of concentrating power in the hands of the president, using the legal system instrumentally to punish critics, and attacking the media and civil society. Despite promising to empower the people, populists lead to processes of democratic erosion and even transform malfunctioning democracies into hybrid regimes. The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism provides instructors, students, and researchers with a thorough and systematic overview of the history and development of populism and analyzes the main debates. It is divided into sections on the theories of populism, on political and social theory and populism, on how populists politicize inequalities and differences, on the media and populism, on its ambiguous relationships with democratization and authoritarianism, and on the distinct regional manifestations of populism. Leading international academics from history, political science, media studies, and sociology map innovative ideas and areas of theoretical and empirical research to understand the phenomenon of global populism. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Carlos de la Torre; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
Populism is on the rise: but to understand this phenomenon, we should first clearly conceptualize it and recognize that populism takes on different forms in various historical and political contexts. These “populisms” pose a threat to modern liberal democracy. As Poland and Hungary show, populists exclude entire swathes of society from the polity, and undermine the formal institutions and the informal norms of democracy.
Populist forces are increasingly relevant, and studies on populism have entered the mainstream of the political science discipline. However, no book has synthesized the ongoing debate on how to study the phenomenon. The main goal of this Handbook is to provide the state of the art of the scholarship on populism. The Handbook lays out not only the cumulated knowledge on populism, but also the ongoing discussions and research gaps on this topic. The Handbook is divided into four sections. The first presents the main conceptual approaches and points out how the phenomenon in question can be empirically analyzed. The second focuses on populist forces across the world with chapters on Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America, the post-Soviet States, and the United States. The third reflects on the interaction between populism and various issues both from scholarly and political viewpoints. Analysis includes the relationship between populism and fascism, foreign policy, gender, nationalism, political parties, religion, social movements, and technocracy. The fourth part encompasses recent normative debates on populism, including chapters on populism and cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, hegemony, the history of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people, and revolution. With each chapter written by an expert in their field, this Handbook will position the study of populism within political science and will be indispensable not only to those who turn to populism for the first time, but also to those who want to take their understanding of populism in new directions.
Introduction 1. Information processing, perception, and misperception 2. The information: attributes and access 3. The decisionmaker: personality and cognition 4. The social milieu: small-group and organizational effects 5. The societal-cultural prism 6. Decisionmakers as practical-intuitive historians: the use and abuse of history 7. Conclusions and policy implications Notes Bibliography Index.
Only movie stars, hit rock groups, and athletes leave more traces of their behavior in the public arena than politicians. Few of a US president’s or a British prime minister’s movements or statements, for example, escape the media’s and archivists’ notice. With 24/7 coverage and the Internet, what leaders from around the world discuss is often beamed into our televisions and put onto the Web. Through content analysis, such materials help us learn more about essentially unavailable public figures, because it does not require their cooperation. Computer-assisted software (such as Atlas.ti, Nudist, Profiler+) and the increase in Internet sources that record material from news services, television, elites’ papers, and archives have improved the ease and reduced the time necessary for conducting such analysis.
ABSTRACT Against the predominantly structural explanations of policy fiascos in the public policy literature, this contribution questions whether idiosyncrasies of individual decision-makers should be considered as alternative sources of foreign policy fiascos. The contribution uses the leadership trait approach and the operational code approach from the field of foreign policy analysis (FPA) to discern the personality traits and political beliefs respectively of British prime ministers who ended up with major foreign policy fiascos. The computer-aided content analysis of more than 900 speech acts shows that British ‘fiasco prime ministers’ do indeed exhibit certain ‘extreme’ personality traits (e.g., a considerably higher level of self-confidence) and political beliefs (e.g., a greater inclination to pursue conflictual strategies) that distinguish them from British ‘non-fiasco prime ministers’ and other world leaders. This suggests that the public policy literature might benefit from allowing for a greater role of individual decision-makers in their analyses of policy fiascos.
Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and contemporary sociological role theory, however, view the effects of roles as interacting with agents’ personalities. In this article, we investigate this question by comparing personality profiles of three Turkish leaders (Özal, Demirel, and Gül) during their tenure as prime minister and during their subsequent time as president. For Gül, we perform an additional comparison during his time as foreign minister. The personality profiles are in the form of quantitative scores generated from machine-coded content analysis of leaders’ words using the Leadership Trait Analysis method. We hypothesize that different leaders will be more susceptible to changing role contexts, depending on core personality traits, and that different traits are more likely to change with new roles. Overall, our results suggest that leaders’ traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between personality and political contexts by offering specific theoretically derived hypotheses and by empirically and statistically examining a preliminary set of expectations that could be applied more broadly to other leaders.
Populism is best understood as a Manichaean worldview linked to a characteristic language or discourse. Chavismo, the movement that sustains Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, is a paradigmatic instance of populism. Using a novel, cross-country dataset on populist discourse, combined with extensive data from within Venezuela and across other countries, this book demonstrates that populist movements can be understood as responses to widespread corruption and economic crisis. The book analyzes the Bolivarian Circles and government missions in Venezuela, revealing how populist ideas influence political organization and policy. The analysis provides important insight into the nature of populism, including its causes and consequences, and addresses broader questions about the role of ideas in politics.
What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germany's Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti-establishment message, which they combine with some ‘host’ ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorises that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches the anti-establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust, controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, sociodemographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account.
Poliheuristic (PH) theory has received strong empirical support for its depiction of the option selection process: it explains how leaders evaluate, weigh, and ultimately choose among a set of policy options. But PH theory does not explain how this initial set of options is generated. Foreign policy problem representation (PR) research has shown that the way in which leaders mentally represent decision problems determines which options are generated for consideration. In this article, we develop a hybrid PR-PH framework in which leaders’ problem representations drive an unconscious screening process that occurs prior to the conscious screening of PH stage 1. We test hypotheses drawn from this framework experimentally and find that key elements of PR (most notably, perceived threat) determine which options consciously occur to decision makers and which options are not generated during a simulated foreign policy crisis.
This article compares the regional foreign policies of the four Black Sea non-great power post-communist states. It is argued that the prominent roles played for a time by Georgia and Romania and their unprecedented influence on Black Sea political and security developments were due to foreign policy options stemming from the “new populist” character of national leaders. The latter took advantage of post-9/11 US regional involvement in order to enhance their international profile and thus increase their domestic mass support. Bulgarian and Ukrainian “new populist” leaders failed to conduct similarly visible regional policies mainly due to domestic factors.