Sunday, June 30, 2002

Looking for X in the Algebra of Leadership
…Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, has come along with his "Political Greatness Scale" — the latest in a long line of scholarly attempts to measure political leadership with the cool objectivity of science.

Dr. Ludwig devoted 18 years of research to the effort. He says his study of 377 rulers from the last 100 years — published last month as "King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership" (University of Kentucky Press) — is certainly ambitious. He insists that his Political Greatness Scale — in which rulers are awarded points for, among other things, creating or liberating countries, winning wars, expanding territory, improving the economy, promoting an original ideology, staying in power and serving as a moral exemplar — is a reliable, bias-free tool for comparing leaders' achievements.

On this scale, Yasir Arafat scores 17 out of a possible 37 points, placing him a couple notches above Bill Clinton and on a par with Dwight D. Eisenhower and François Mitterrand. The scale's real overachievers, however, are for the most part a motley crew of despots and tyrants, including Hitler (25), Mussolini (26), Stalin (29), Mao (30) and Kemal Ataturk of Turkey (31), as well as a lone American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (30).

Dr. Ludwig says the numbers reflect a leader's impact on the world, not his personal virtue. On this scale, for example, warmongering turns out to be critical to one's long-term historical standing. "No American president can be regarded as great unless they've been involved in war and been responsible for the death of many," Dr. Ludwig said.

The belief that dominant personalities shape the course of history is known as Great Man theory, after the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle, who argued that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." And in the fledgling discipline of leadership studies, Great Man theory — like almost everything else about the field — is hotly contested.

"The study of leadership is so fragmented, it's almost pulverized," said James MacGregor Burns, the 83-year-old political scientist and Roosevelt biographer, whose 1978 book, "Leadership," is regarded as one of the field's founding texts. While some leadership scholars try to plumb the depths of rulers' psyches — or measure specific traits like charisma, motivation and emotional intelligence — others ignore personality altogether, emphasizing political systems and institutions, the reciprocal benefits of leader-follower interactions or any number of economic and social variables.

The first important modern studies of the American presidency, for example, implicitly endorsed a Great Man approach.…

The body of scholarship devoted to the first executive's psyche continues to grow. At the University of Michigan, for example, David G. Winter, a psychology professor, uses an elaborate scoring system to rate presidential speeches and statements for their "motivational" content. (Speechwriters are only a minor impediment, he says.) He has scored inaugural addresses by every American president, including George W. Bush, whose "motive profile," he says, "suggested a more aggressive and less entrepreneurial version of his father."

In Mr. Winter's assessment, the presidency may be best suited to those who get greater satisfaction from exercising power and socializing than from achieving policy goals. "Based on past research about presidential motives and performance, we can predict that Bush will enjoy being president," Mr. Winter wrote in his analysis of the speech. (Mr. Bush also distinguished himself by using the word "not" almost 17 times per 1,000 words — more than any previous president — which Mr. Winter says is a measure of "activity inhibition," typically high in people who have given up alcohol or do not drink.)

Mr. Winter also studies the minds of foreign leaders. His current project involves scoring statements by senior officials in India and Pakistan to determine the likely outcome of the crisis in Kashmir. He said his analysis was still incomplete. "Like all academics, we're going to predict whether war will occur or not a couple of months after it did or didn't," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/29/arts/29LEAD.html

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