Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Political Science
First Advisor
Gregory Love
Second Advisor
Susan Allen
Third Advisor
Jonathan Klingler
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
With the analysis of thousands of speeches delivered at the United Nations General Assembly to detect personality of global leaders, this dissertation adds a stepping stone to the first image research, in particular, the psychological approaches in International Relations and its stream of Foreign Policy Analysis. Theoretically, it advances the trait models of psychological approaches by building on the lexical theory of personality psychology to analyze the traits of global elites. The theory has been tested over decades showing that linguistic cues like utterances not only provide us with the information on semantics but also the speaker including her personality traits. Methodologically, this dissertation, to the best of my knowledge, is the first attempt in IR to analyze the linguistic cues of global leaders using machine learning tools to understand their psychological characteristics on the framework of the Big Five. With the stability across adult lifespan and generalizability across domains as well as cultures, the Big Five provides us with parsimonious tool to study the personality traits of global leaders worrying less about context-specificity and time-specificity concerns with other established content-analytic at-a-distance methods such as Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA). Additionally, this dissertation also demonstrate that the translated speeches can capture the nuances of native languages using currently available psycholinguistic dictionaries even without developing a specific language based coding scheme. Similarly, I show that the psycholinguistic properties of UNGA speeches and more spontaneous forms of texts such as media interviews, which are believed to capture a ‘truer’ personality, are highly comparable. These findings give scholars further confidence in using widely available public statements to perform the relevant tasks amid the the paucity of more spontaneous forms of textual statements. The availability of personality estimates of the world leaders from the public speeches opens several research avenues to test the substantive implication of leader personality on her policy decisions. In a substantive application to International Relations, I find that the leaders scoring less on agreeableness and more on conscientiousness have a higher propensity of risk-taking –use of military force abroad, for instance. Similarly, in an application to Comparative Politics, I demonstrate that my findings provide evidence to the established narratives about the personality of populist leaders that they are highly extraverted, and display negative tone in rhetoric. Finally, with a case study on Indian Prime Ministers over 75 years analyzing their rare private letters, I provide further evidence to the personality - policy link contributing to the burgeoning psychological approaches in behavioral political science.
Recommended Citation
Acharya, Mahesh, "'Mark My Words' : Measuring Personality of Global Leaders" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2904.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2904