Profiling foreign policy leaders in their own language: New insights into the stability and formation of leadership traits
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120910984 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
research-article2020
Original Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Profiling foreign policy leaders
2020, Vol. 22(2) 256 –273
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
in their own language: New
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120910984
DOI: 10.1177/1369148120910984
insights into the stability and
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
formation of leadership traits
Christian Rabini1 , Klaus Brummer1,
Katharina Dimmroth1 and Mischa Hansel2
Abstract
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.
Keywords
automated content analysis, coding schemes, foreign policy analysis, German foreign policy,
leadership traits, profiler plus
Leaders matter in international politics. One way to learn more about political personali-
ties is with Margaret Hermann’s (1980, 2005a) Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA). Building
on Hermann’s original work, subsequent research has identified the leadership styles of a
broad array of actors, ranging from foreign ministers, prime minister, and presidents in
both democratic and authoritarian systems to top-bureaucrats of international organisa-
tions to central bankers. Relatedly, leadership profiles have been used to account for a
wide array of foreign policy decisions. While a larger part of the research has focused on
decisions on the use of force, scholars have also used leadership traits to account, for
instance, for foreign policy change, agency slack by international organisations, or the
1Faculty of History and Social Science, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany
2Development and Peace Foundation, Bonn, Germany
Corresponding author:
Christian Rabini, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Universitätsallee 1, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany.
Email: Christian.Rabini@ku.de
Rabini et al.
257
management of global financial crises (e.g. Brummer, 2014; Hermann, 1984; Thies,
2009; Yang, 2010).
In order to further facilitate the at-a-distance assessment of psychological characteris-
tics of political leaders, a coding scheme for LTA was developed by Social Science
Automation. This coding scheme, which is hosted by the Profiler Plus platform, has auto-
mated the otherwise hand-coding procedure. However, to date, the LTA coding scheme
contained in Profiler Plus can only analyse data, in the form of leaders’ verbal statements,
that exists in English. As a result, most LTA researchers have been facing a conundrum
when it comes to assessing non-English-speaking political leaders using computer-aided
text analysis. In order to take advantage of the automated coding software, they have had
to resort either to the few utterances that are available in English or to translations which,
however, may not accurately reflect the nuances contained in the leaders’ original state-
ments (see, for example, Hermann, 1984; Kesgin, 2013).
As a result, certain empirical questions cannot be answered in a rigorous manner. This
is true for German foreign policy. Rather than relying on systematic empirical analysis,
explanations are based on anecdotal evidence, as has been the case, for instance, with
respect to the effect of critical historical junctures on the leadership traits of German for-
eign policy leaders. Moreover, methodological challenges are very likely among the main
reasons why some other important questions have not really been addressed at all, such as
the effect of changes in bureaucratic positions on the leadership traits of Germany’s for-
eign policy elite, or the possibly foundational effects of war-time experience on the very
formation of those traits.
We address this research gap by creating a German LTA coding scheme for the Profiler
Plus platform. This scheme is not merely a translation of the English version but rather an
attempt to establish an ‘original’ German version that is based on Hermann’s (2005a)
definitions and which takes into account the idiosyncrasies of the German language in
general and the rules of political discourse in particular. This new coding scheme allows
empirical analysis that helps shed new or different light on German foreign policy and at
the same time contributes to our understanding of the role of leaders and leadership traits
in the making of foreign policy more generally.
We use this novel tool to create leadership profiles of all German chancellors and for-
eign ministers from 1949 to 2017. In addition, we present empirical illustrations in which
the interconnection between, respectively, institutional roles and historical critical junc-
tures, on the one hand, and the stability or changeability of leadership traits, on the other
hand, are discussed. Furthermore, we assess the possibly formative experience of war on
the manifestation of certain leadership traits. Those examples highlight the added value
in empirical terms of the new methodological tool. Overall, this article contributes to the
broadening of automated content analysis of speech acts in languages other than English,
and to the ‘decentering’ of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) away from its North American
origins more broadly.
The remainder of this article proceeds as follows: First, we provide a more detailed
account of the methodological and conceptual merits of our approach. Next, we introduce
the core tenets of LTA. We then address two challenges and possible solutions regarding
the creation of a German coding scheme for LTA, pertaining to word retrieval and the
idiosyncrasies of the German language, respectively. Subsequently, the article provides
the results for 17 German chancellors and foreign ministers since 1949. This is followed
by three brief empirical illustrations that demonstrate the value added offered by the
258
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(2)
German coding scheme for our understanding of German foreign policy. We conclude
with a brief summary and suggestions for future research.
On the merits of moving LTA towards non-English-
language contexts
The preceding discussion begs two questions: Why not simply translate texts into English
so that the existing coding schemes can be used? And why German/y? Regarding the first
question, developing coding schemes for languages other than English allows for the
analysis of leaders’ speech acts made in their native language. The underlying rationale
for analysing speech acts is that leaders’ beliefs and ideas are conveyed through and
therefore discernable from their statements. Even if leaders are fluent in English they are
obviously much more at ease with their native language. This holds particularly true for
situations in which leaders do not deliver a scripted speech but engage in spontaneous
conversations with their audience. Indeed, LTA requires the use of spontaneous speech
acts rather than scripted speeches. The better command of their native language compared
to English means that (spontaneous) utterances in their mother tongue should lead to
more nuanced and thus also more accurate expressions of ‘who leaders are’ compared to
statements in English that features as their second or maybe even third language.
In addition, there are also practical advantages associated with the opportunity to ana-
lyse speech acts in their original form. Most importantly, leaders from the non-English-
speaking world speak much more frequently in their native language than they do in
English. As a result, speech material in their native language is available in much greater
quantity, thus broadening the data material available for empirical analysis. Moreover,
many if not most of those speech acts are not available as English translations. Engaging
in translations is a cumbersome and time-consuming task for scholars. On top of this,
scholars are usually not trained to translate texts in the first place. Inevitably, information
will be lost in translation. Overall, then, original speech acts, which are more nuanced in
contents and more plentiful in number, are to be preferred over translations. The existence
of non-English-language schemes permits the mining of such data.
Turning to the second question, the German language and thus Germany1 and its for-
eign policy elite as an object of study have been selected for a number of reasons. For
starters, Germany is one of the predominant countries, if not the predominant country, in
Europe. Some scholars have even referred to it as Europe’s hegemon, albeit a ‘reluctant’
one (Paterson, 2011). Germany is one of the world’s leading economies, featuring the
fourth largest GDP of all countries (World Bank, 2018). Over the last couple of...
To continue reading
Request your trial