It’s Not Just the Gender!: Personality of Women Leaders and Foreign Policy

• In Event: Gender and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Two competing camps are prominent as to how the gender of a leader could play a role in foreign policy outcomes. The first camp prioritising bio-evolutionary factors and social norms sees women leaders as pacifist (or dovish). On the contrary, the second school of thought argues that women leaders tend to be hawkish as they are under more pressure to counter gender stereotypes and to avoid punishment from the domestic electorate. Amid these contrarian beliefs, we argue that the personality traits of women leaders (yes, male leaders too) would play a significant role in determining the path they traverse in terms of foreign policy. This approach would also explain the variation within the women leaders' foreign policy directions. With the help of a novel dataset on leader personality traits approximated from their speeches using recent Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, we report our preliminary findings. For instance, women leaders who are deemed as hawks are found to score higher on extraversion (one of the Big Five traits). Extraversion is mainly represented by the facets like warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, and excitement seeking. Kowert and Hermann (1997) also demonstrated that only the facet of excitement-seeking is positively correlated with risk-taking. Moreover, from the neuropsychological standpoint, extraversion is characterized by the reward-processing functions of the dopamine system making extraverts put undue weight on the gains rather than losses while analyzing the expected utilities (DeYoung et al., 2010; Fischer, Wik, & Fredrikson, 1997; Smillie & Wacker, 2014). This fixation on potential gains leads to overconfidence in extroverts which tends to make them overestimate success or gains and tread in extremely risky paths like the use of force. Based on these arguments, the excitement-seeking facet, and the cognitive constraint of putting undue weight on rewards can be parameterized as extraversion’s risk-taking tendency. Hence, I hypothesize that women leaders who score higher on extraversion are more likely to use military force i.e., tread on a riskier foreign policy direction. Though often overshadowed, mostly in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by the variables at the two levels--domestic and systemic (second, and third images), recent works have again brought back the leader's (first image) importance to the scholarly discourse. The leader’s personality becomes even more crucial in determining what path the country takes especially during critical times when she occupies a strategic position, when spontaneous and effortful behavior is needed, and when the situation is marked by emotional and symbolic significance.
In sum, my project contributes in two major ways. First, my approach of personality-policy linkage helps to explain the variation within the women leaders' foreign policy directions which has, until recently, been analyzed mostly via the dichotomy of a gendered lens. The second contribution is empirical. It uses a pre-trained machine learning algorithm to approximate the personalities of world leaders from their speeches within the widely accepted ‘Big Five’ framework of traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. While promoting an interdisciplinary approach, my research improves upon the extant Personality Assessment at-a-distance (PAD) methods which have been mostly US-centric, reliant upon expert ratings, and designed for specific tasks only— Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), Operational Code Analysis (OCA), for instance. I look at the speeches of the leaders delivered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) from 1946 to 2022. I have also validated my findings with more spontaneous forms of speeches like media interviews which can give confidence to the scholars in using widely available written texts to perform the tasks at hand.

Author

• Mahesh Acharya, The University of Mississippi