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Profiling the personality of populist foreign policy makers: a leadership trait analysis

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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.

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Notes

  1. A fourth approach explains populism as a socio-cultural political style (Moffitt 2016; Ostiguy 2017). This cumulative concept combines and thickens discursive and strategic notions by highlighting the political performances and modes of identification at play in populist leader–follower relations. For a leader-centred foreign policy study, however, the political-strategic focus better narrows down the distinct actions of populist decision-makers.

  2. Destradi et al. (2021) highlight the potential for combining different approaches to populism in foreign policy studies, including the relatively neglected political-strategic concept.

  3. Although the political-strategic approach clearly emerged from the study of Latin American politics, it also lends itself to analyses of populist agency in North America, Europe, and Asia (Weyland 2017; Kenny 2019; Weyland and Madrid 2019).

  4. While a political-strategic perspective stresses leaders’ proactive agency in creating these confrontations, they could simultaneously be driven by self-validating ‘people-vs.-elite’ attitudes.

  5. In specific, observers may judge the agency of leaders with high SC and high CC scores as ‘erratic and opportunistic’, but ‘[i]f one knows the goals and political contexts of such leaders, their decisions and actions become more logical’ (Hermann 2005: 193). As Weyland (2013: 126) clarifies: ‘Although personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders […] make sudden twists and turns in response to changing opportunities and challenges, they do follow an underlying strategy.’

  6. The coding schemes from Social Science Automation are available at https://socialscience.net/.

  7. Following this line of reasoning, Erdoğan or Orbán may not be typical nationalists, either.

  8. Populist leaders’ average and sometimes even (leaning) high CC values make this inference plausible.

  9. In this sense, populist attitudes could operate similarly at the mass- and leader-levels (see Erisen et al. 2021).

  10. Both the BACE (0.33) and TASK (0.55) scores of the progressive subgroup are significantly lower at the p = 0.01 level than those of the conservative subgroup (0.37 and 0.61, respectively), while the PWR score (0.22 versus 0.25) is significantly lower at p = 0.05.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ISA 2022 Annual Conference (Nashville). We would like to thank participants and especially discussant Jean-Christophe Boucher for valuable feedback. Further thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors for helpful comments and suggestions for improvement. We also thank Sophie Koch and Nora Legonin for their research assistance in the data collection.

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  1. Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Kapuzinergasse 2, 85072, Eichstätt, Germany

    Stephan Fouquet & Klaus Brummer

  2. Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Universitätsallee 1, 85072, Eichstätt, Germany

    Klaus Brummer

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Fouquet, S., Brummer, K. Profiling the personality of populist foreign policy makers: a leadership trait analysis. J Int Relat Dev 26, 1–29 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00270-2

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