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Barber's Typological Analysis of Political Leaders*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

James H. Qualls
James H. Qualls*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Abstract

James Barber's predictive theory of presidential behavior has evoked varied reactions, which have ranged from praise for its sensitization of readers to the fact that personality affects presidential performance, to criticisms for the emphasis that the theory places on personality, to questions about the validity of the theory. This article addresses itself to the criticisms and the questions.

Concerning the questions, it shows, first, that in analyzing presidents, Barber assumes the validity of “character”–the core construct of the theory. It shows, second, that Barber's earlier research on Connecticut legislators, from which “character” derives, does not empirically establish the construct.

Concerning the criticisms, the article isolates a possible origin of the psychological reductionism evident in Barber's explanations of presidential performance. The article identifies a similar reductionism in Barber's legislative research and attributes this reductionism to a fallacious extra-empirical argument.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 182 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

I want to express my appreciation to Stephen V. Stephens, Alan J. Eade, Jeffrey M. Berry, David W. Depew, Edward V. Heck, Robert L. Peabody, and Frances E. Rourke for their suggestions and advice. In addition, I want to thank the Review's anonymous referees and its manuscript editor, Ellen Siegelman, for their extremely helpful comments. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my wife, Deborah, for her support. Her knowledge and skill as a clinician have proved to be invaluable resources in my study of personality and politics. Responsibility for the contents of the article remains, of course, solely mine.

References

1 Barber, James David, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972)Google Scholar.

2 Unless otherwise identified, quotations in the following section are from Barber, , The Presidential Character, pp. 3–14 Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Theodore H. White's analysis of the lack of resonance between the themes George McGovern symbolized and the mood of the American people in 1972. The Making of the President 1972 (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 494–99.Google Scholar

4 For a further discussion see George, Alexander, “Assessing Presidential Character,” World Politics, 26 (January 1974), 234–82, especially 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The Presidential Character, p. 364.

6 Ibid., p. 365.

7 Ibid., p. 353.

8 Ibid., p. 373.

9 Ibid, p. 365.

10 Ibid., p. 357.

11 George has summarized the general predictions for all four types. “Assessing Presidential Character,” p. 250. The following is taken from that summary. (Page numbers in parentheses are pages in The Presidential Character from which George's quotations are taken.)

… Active-positives … “display personal strengths specially attuned to the Presidency, strengths which enabled them to make of that office an engine of progress” (p. 210)… [but] “in their haste to make things happen, may too quickly and easily knock down the ‘formalities’ that hold the democratic order in place” (p. 246).

The active-negatives … have character-rooted needs that “invade and dominate, to an unusual degree, their political habits and perceptions” (p. 141). They tend to “persevere rigidly in a disastrous policy”(p. 95).

Passive-negatives … “pose a different danger … the danger of drift” (p. 145). They leave “vacant the energizing, initiating, stimulating possibilities of the role” (p. 173). Yet in certain historical circumstances mis type can provide a needed “breathing spell” for recovery after a period of frantic politics (p. 145).

Passive-positives … are, like the passive-negatives, “responders, not initiators or pushers…” (p. 174). Yet, “for a people in search of community, they provide a refreshing hopefulness and at least some sense of sharing and caring”(p. 206).

12 The Presidential Character, p. 441.

13 Certainly Barber's own sense of its accuracy has been strengthened. See Barber, James D., “The Things We Might Have Seen,” The New York Times, 8 November 1973, p. 47 Google Scholar; and “President Nixon and Richard Nixon: Character Trap,” Psychology Today (October 1974), pp. 113–18Google Scholar.

14 Knutson, Jeanne N., “Personality in the Study of Politics,” in Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. Knutson, Jeanne N. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1973), pp. 28–56 Google Scholar; Katz, Daniel, “Patterns of Leadership,” in Knutson, , pp. 203–33Google Scholar; Greenstein, Fred I., “Political Psychology: A Pluralistic Universe,” in Knutson, , pp. 438–69Google Scholar; Bruce Mazlish, review of The Presidential Character, by Barber, James David, in New York Times Book Review, 8 October 1972, pp. 30–32 Google Scholar; Hargrove, Erwin C., “Presidential Personality and Revisionist Views of the Presidency,” American Journal of Political Science, 17 (November 1973), 819–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 “Assessing Presidential Character.”

16 Ibid., p. 242.

17 Ibid., p. 243.

18 Ibid., p. 279, see also p. 255; and Mazlish, review of The Presidential Character.

19 “Political Psychology: A Pluralistic Universe,” p. 456.

20 A recent article by Barber, , “Strategies for Understanding Politicians,” American Journal of Political Science, 18 (May 1974), 443–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, appears to be his response to his critics, whom he leaves unnamed. But he by no means deals satisfactorily with most of the criticisms, and especially with George's.

21 “Assessing Presidential Character,” pp. 244–45.

22 Ibid., p. 246.

23 Ibid., pp. 249, 253, and 255. The preeminence of personality is, however, a necessary assumption for Barber's general predictions. If all three potential determinants were accorded equal importance, predictions extrapolated from previous performances would be contingent on ceteris paribus conditions.

24 Ibid., p. 253.

25 Ibid., pp. 255–60.

26 Ibid., p. 251.

27 “Assessing Presidential Character,” p. 256.

28 Ibid., pp. 256–71.

29 Ibid., p. 251.

30 Ibid., p. 240.

31 “Coding Scheme for Presidential Biographies,” Yale University, January 1968 (mimeographed)Google Scholar.

32 “Coding Scheme for Presidential Biographies,” p. 9.

33 “Assessing Presidential Character,” p. 252, n. 23.

34 The Presidential Character, p. 199.

35 Ibid., p. 172. There is also evidence in pre-Presidential Character papers that Barber considered the character construct to be axiomatic. Evidence may be found, for example, in Barber's explication of his typology, which precedes his discussion of the styles of Hoover, and Coolidge, , in “Classifying and Predicting Presidential Styles: Two Weak Presidents,” Journal of Social Issues, 24 (1968), 51–80 Google Scholar; reprinted in The Presidency, ed. Wildavsky, Aaron (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 94–120, especially p. 95Google Scholar.

36 The Lawmakers: Recruitment and Adaptation to Legislative Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; “The Legislator's First Session” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1960)Google Scholar.

37 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 37.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., p. 40. Barber employed “an adaptation of the ‘focused interview’ technique” presented by Merton, Robert K., Fiske, Marjorie, and Kendall, Patricia L., The Focused Interview (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956)Google Scholar. Barber describes the technique in the following way:

The interviewer begins by referring to some event in which the respondent has been or will be involved. The respondent is asked to describe his behavior in this event: what did he actually do? This is followed by questions on his reactions, choices, feelings, and thoughts about this particular event. The method requires the constant moving back and forth between these responses and the specification of the events to which they refer. The Lawmakers, p. 16.

40 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 42.

41 Ibid., p. 43.

42 Ibid., p. 44.

43 Ibid., p. 45.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., pp. 38–39.

46 Ibid., p. 45.

47 Ibid., pp. 45–46.

48 The Lawmakers, p. 214.

49 Ibid.

50 The more complete report is appended to “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 267–337. In that report Barber breaks down the legislators into their four classifications on every item. And he reports the complete distributions of many items that he simply dichotomizes in The Lawmakers.

51 In The Lawmakers, pp. 247–50, Barber discusses the contributions of each type. He concludes that the contributions of legislators who are not Lawmakers are “partial and minor” in comparison with the disfunctional effects of these legislators' presence. (See especially p. 250.) His conclusion is even more baldly stated in “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 241–42.

52 The Lawmakers, pp. 18–19.

53 The Lawmakers, pp. 272–73.

54 Ibid., p. 19. The reader will note that this interpretation differs from the one Barber initially employed; see above, p. 189, and “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 37, for Barber's original interpretation of the item; and see the section on Attitude, below, for a discussion of the difference.

55 Explanations of “reliability” can be found in Nunnally, Jum C. Jr., Introduction to Psychological Measurement (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 108 Google Scholar; and in Lanyon, Richard I. and Goodstein, Leonard D., Personality Assessment (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), p. 120 Google Scholar. Explanations of “validity” can be found in Kerlinger, Fred N., Foundations of Behavioral Research (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 444–62Google Scholar; and in Selltiz, Claire et al., Research Methods in Social Relations, rev. 1 vol. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1959), pp. 154–66Google Scholar.

56 On distinguishing true change from instability see Nunnally, Jum C., Psychometric Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp. 216–17Google Scholar.

57 The Lawmakers, p. 163.

58 Eighteen of the 20 attorneys who answered Barber's postsession questionnaire were “active” in the legislature (8 were Advertisers; 10 were Lawmakers). “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 276, Table A3. In comparison with other legislators, attorneys were no doubt much more “at home” reorganizing the state's entire minor court system and enacting a uniform commercial code.

59 Though Barber does not report the distribution of legislators on the activity scores, he does note that his dividing line distinguished 79 “passive” legislators, whose scores ranged from 0 through 7, from 71 “active” legislators, whose scores ranged from 8 through 16. This asymmetry does not necessarily preclude the median as the cutting point. The distribution could have arisen because Barber categorized as “passives” those legislators with the median activity scores.

60 Nunnally, , Introduction to Psychological Measurement, p. 127 Google Scholar.

61 On the durability of attitudes and traits, see Hall, Calvin S. and Lindzey, Gardner, Theories of Personality, 2d ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970), pp. 263–68Google Scholar; Smith, M. Brewster, Bruner, Jerome S. and White, Robert W., Opinions and Personality (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956), pp. 7–47 Google Scholar; Krech, David, Crutchfield, Richard S., and Ballachey, Egerton L., Individual in Society (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1962), pp. 103–34 and 215–69Google Scholar.

62 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 43.

63 Ibid., p. 37.

64 The Lawmakers, p. 19.

65 In an interview by Tallmer, Jerry, “A Presidential Primer,” New York Post, 1 September 1972 Google Scholar, Barber states:

I was writing my first book, The Lawmakers, about state legislators, and was puzzled by the fact that so many people fight for public office and then drop out. I figured those who most enjoy it wouldn't drop out. … I was going over and over the indices of who stayed at the job and who enjoyed it—and I held up the two codes and the correlation was zero, absolute zero. … When that happens you either commit suicide or you try to figure out the answer. And the basic answer was that you can get people who are as active as hell in politics and suffering under it.

66 Lanyon, and Goodstein, , Personality Assessment, pp. 107–10, and 176 Google Scholar; Nunnally, , Psychometric Theory, p. 489 Google Scholar.

Derived from Barber, , “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 59, 103, and 171 Google Scholar; and The Lawmakers, p. 121.

67 “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 108–10.

68 Ibid., p. 176.

69 Ibid, pp. 110–11.

70 Ibid., pp. 59–60.

71 Ibid., p. 78.

72 Ibid., pp. 187–88.

73 Ibid., p. 189.

74 Ibid., p. 115.

75 Ibid., pp. 112–14.

76 Ibid., p. 189.

77 In the analysis in The Lawmakers Barber does connect the responses of the pseudonymous interviewees he uses as examples. For several reasons, however, this analysis does not give the reader any clearer sense of the characteristics of the interviewees: (1) Barber discusses only three interviewees of each type–a total of only half the number he interviewed. (2) His “examples” are not average interviewees but rather exemplars of the inferred patterns. (3) In analyzing the Advertisers Barber does not even treat the examples equally. “Mike Jackson”–the tough-talking, Advertiser exemplar–dominates Chapter 3 of The Lawmakers. Barber cites him more frequently than he cites both the other Advertisers. Thus for the 16 Advertisers in Barber's study the supposed sample of six interviewees becomes little more than a sample of one.

78 In “The Legislator's First Session” Barber does not even attempt to establish the accentuated strategy of each of his interviewees; rather from the responses he adduces he merely arrives at a judgment of the modal strategy of a type through some unspecified inferential process. In The Lawmakers Barber initially appears to make more of an effort to establish the accentuated strategies of each of his examples. Closer examination reveals, however, that he is actually considering alternative modal strategies for each type. See The Lawmakers, pp. 43–54 (Spectators), 90–104 (Advertisers), 145–54 (Reluctants), and 191–205 (Lawmakers). Moreover, in The Lawmakers the effort has the cast of a justification for conclusions already arrived at.

79 “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 66–68.

80 Ibid., p. 132.

81 Ibid., p. 141.

82 Ibid., p. 227.

83 The Lawmakers, p. 117; see also p. 140.

84 Ibid., pp. 128, 228–29, and 232.

85 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 119–20.

86 “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 119–20.

87 In The Lawmakers, pp. 43–45, Barber still describes achievement as a potentially compensatory strategy; but in his discussion of Advertisers (p. 97ff.) he deemphasizes–in comparison with his earlier treatment–the degree to which they manifest achievement and echoes the earlier interpretation (quoted above) which in effect precludes compensatory achievement.

88 Barber's choice of modal strategies may depend on external influences as much as on the responses of the legislators themselves. In the bibliographical appendix to The Lawmakers, pp. 261–63, Barber lists Krech, , Crutchfield, , and Ballachey, , Individual in Society, p. 114 Google Scholar, as a source on “patterns of interaction.” There, in illustrating the effects of the interaction of interpersonal response traits, the authors cite H. G. Gough's speculation about the behavior caused by the interaction of “dominance” and “sociability” ( Gough, H. G., Manual for the California Psychological Inventory [Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1957]Google Scholar). The authors produce the first table (below) to summarize Gough's predictions. Barber's modal strategies and their respective types are summarized in the second table.

89 P. 214.

90 The six specific strategies are listed below in the order Barber discusses them. I have noted in parentheses the number of interviewee responses he offers in support of each. I am not suggesting that all one need do is compare the number of responses to determine which is the group's modal strategy. These 16 responses, after all, are given by only three interviewees; moreover, there is still the problem of identifying each interviewee's accentuated strategy. However, attaching significance to the amount of evidence offered does seem to have some merit. As is evident, the first four strategies fall much more readily in the “withdrawal” category.

Spectators' Strategies

(1) withdrawal of “one's emotions from (or avoid[ance of] investing them in) one's experience,” p. 79 (no responses)

(2) “concealment: the Spectator avoids as far as possible the revelation to others of his supposed inadequacies,” p. 79 (3 responses)

(3) “avoid[s] thinking much about matters beyond the immediate situation,” p. 80 (4 responses)

(4) “keep[s] his social relationships superficial,” p. 82 (6 responses)

(5) “submission,” p. 84 (2 responses)

(6) “distraction,” p. 85 (1 response)

91 “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 118–19.

92 Ibid., p. 124.

93 Again, “accentuated” strategy refers to that strategy on which an individual most frequently relies. “Modal” strategy refers to the strategy which is most frequently “accentuated” by legislators of a type.

94 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 113.

95 Ibid, p. 112.

96 Ibid., p. 298, Table D1.

97 Ibid., p. 223.

98 Ibid., p. 278, Table B1.

99 Ibid., pp. 136–38; see also The Lawmakers, pp. 128–29 and 153.

100 In discussing the Reluctant's “temptation to withdraw,” Barber writes: “Given his relatively modest abilities and his flagging energies, the most fundamental temptation he encounters–not only in politics but in life in general–is the longing for peace, the desire not to be bothered, the temptation to quit trying to perform like a youngster. When this desire becomes intense and general, senility begins, first with an overall slowdown and then with a flickering out of interest and activity in one sphere after another of his life.

“Compared with most people in their age group, Reluctant legislators probably are better able to resist these temptations. They are unusual oldsters in some important respects: they are habituated to hard work and social intercourse, and they have consciences that place a special emphasis on being useful and sociable.”

In conclusion he finds them still “far short of senility,” but the age connotations remain indelible throughout his analysis. The Lawmakers, p. 153.

101 “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 285, Table B14.

102 Ibid, p. 281, Table B6.

103 Ibid., p. 326, Table E7.

104 Ibid., pp. 114–16 and 291, Table C2.

105 The surface simplicity of Barber's methodology belies the formidable array of populations and samples that this methodology necessarily defines. Reconstructing these populations and samples is no mean task, for the information Barber supplies is incomplete and in places even contradictory.

The Lawmakers does not disclose that some of the samples and populations Barber reports include senators, that one of the 27 interviewees whom Barber portrays as members of the lower house (p. 15) was a senator, and that the 94 first-term legislators who were willing to be interviewed (p. 274) included some freshman senators.

“The Legislator's First Session” supplies this information; but it leaves unresolved which of two contradictory figures for those who were not willing to be interviewed is correct. (Cf. The Lawmakers, p. 275; and “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 79.) Nor can it fix the number of legislators who responded to the postsession questionnaire. (Cf. The Lawmakers, Appendix Table 2, p. 275; and “The Legislator's First Session,” Appendix C passim.)

106 See Table 16 for the meaning of ϵ.

107 Presession questionnaires were mailed in December; interviews were conducted March through June; postsession questionnaires were mailed in August. “The Legislator's First Session,” chap. 3.

108 That is, it seems unlikely that *F1 = *F1∩H1 and that *F2=*F2∩H2.

109 The Lawmakers, p. 214.

110 Horney, Karen, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), chaps. 6 and 10Google Scholar.

111 The Lawmakers, p. 224. For Barber's full discussion, see pp. 219–25.

112 See his initial consideration of them in his preliminary efforts to find correlates of “willingness to return,” in “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 40.

113 I have taken this and the three following quotations from Barber's summary chapter in The Lawmakers because his characterizations there are more succinct. Corresponding pages in “The Legislator's First Session” are cited to facilitate comparison. The Lawmakers, p. 214; “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 64ff.

114 The Lawmakers, p. 215; “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 138.

115 The Lawmakers, p. 215; “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 101ff.

116 The Lawmakers, p. 216; “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 170ff.

117 See, for example, “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 64–65.

118 Ibid., pp. 65 and 102–3.

119 Perfect association–“strong monotonicity” in the sense explicated by Weisberg, Herbert F., “Models of Statistical Relationship,” American Political Science Review, 68 (December 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1638–55–is a prerequisite for the explanatory characteristic to be a necessary and sufficient condition. Likewise, for the explanatory characteristic to be a sufficient condition, those who exhibit the explanatory characteristic must constitute a proper subset of those who exhibit the dependent characteristic; and for the explanatory characteristic to be a necessary condition, those who exhibit the dependent characteristic must constitute a proper subset of those who exhibit the explanatory characteristic.

120 The Lawmakers, pp. 10–15.

121 Cf. George, , “Assessing Presidential Character,” p. 253 Google Scholar.

122 Thus, motivations are not certainly reducible to either productiveness that is functional for the institution (in the case of Lawmakers) or aggrandizement of self-esteem that is disfunctional (in the case of the other three types). Cf. Barber, , The Lawmakers, pp. 13–14 Google Scholar.

123 Ibid., p. 213.

124 For example, in “The Legislator's First Session,” pp. 66–73, Barber infers a “sagging sense of self-esteem” (p. 73) from “direct confessions of self doubt … in situations of exposure to others” (p. 72).

125 Barber, , “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 73 Google Scholar.

126 See Lockard, Duane, New England State Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 228 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 Ibid., pp. 233–42.

128 Ibid., p. 231.

129 Ibid., pp. 271–77.

130 Ibid., p. 269 n. See also, The Council of State Governments, The Book of the States 1958–1959 (Chicago: The Council of State Gov'ts., 1958), p. 35 Google Scholar; and The Book of the States 1960–1961 (Chicago: The Council of State Gov'ts., 1960), p. 37 Google Scholar.

131 See above, p. 190; and “The Legislator's First Session,” p. 45.

132 The Lawmakers, p. 16.

133 Ibid., p. 271.

134 “Assessing Presidential Character,” pp. 239 and 262–63.

135 Reservations about the truth of Barber's character construct do not constitute a conclusion that Barber's descriptions of Nixon are necessarily less perceptive than others' descriptions. Cf. Mazlich, Bruce, In Search of Nixon (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973)Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, Nixon Agonistes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969)Google Scholar; and Hargrove, “Presidential Personality and Revisionist Views of the Presidency.”

136 Cf. Barber's, discussion of his sources, The Presidential Character, pp. v–vii Google Scholar.

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