1. HOW DO WE STUDY POLITICAL LEADERS?

2. THE BIG QUESTIONS: What exactly is a typology and why is it useful to classify leaders? What are some of the best known typologies for studying leadership? What is the difference between a “normative” typology and an “empirical” one? How do historians, social scientists, and psychologists differ in their approach to studying leadership?

3. SOME INITIAL POINTS: What does Malcom Gladwell’s spaghetti talk tell us about classification? (http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html )http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html Classifying is worth doing because it can help us to better understand why leaders do what they do Identifying the correct categories is as important as correctly classifying There isn’t one type of leader… There are types. There isn’t one type of leadership…There are types. Different classification schemes will help us to group leaders for different purposes Mixing methods can make for good social science. Rather than going to Italy to understand the historical origins of spaghetti sauce, or doing a deep “case study” of Ragu and Prego, Gladwell’s friend collected a lot of data from a lot of observations.

4. HOW CAN DO WE CLASSIFY GOOD LEADERS USEFULLY? NORMATIVE AND EMPIRICAL SCHEMES

5. WE’VE ALREADY TALKED ABOUT ONE EMPIRICAL CLASSIFICATION SCHEME: There are leaders who influence the direction of history. There are leaders who are necessary (but not sufficient) to make history or to dramatically change direction There are leaders whose presence, but itself was sufficient to have changed the direction of history. Then there are the “great” leaders whose presence made dramatically important changes to the path of history. Conservative vs. Radical leadership (going back vs. going forward)

6. THINKING ABOUT REGIMES AND TYPES OF LEADERS? ARISTOTLE’S TAKE

7. STILL MORE WAYS, SCHOLARS HAVE TRIED TO CATEGORIZE DIFFERENT TYPES OF LEADERS

8. CAN WE CLASSIFY MODERN LEADERS BY REGIME TYPE? LUDWIG’S TAKE (see esp. pg. 41) Tyrants (aka despots) Monarchs Visionaries (aka social engineers or totalitarians) Authoritarians Transitional leaders (sometimes called modernizing leaders) Democrats

9. HOW DO SOME SOCIAL SCIENTISTS STUDY LEADERSHIP COMPARATIVELY? AS LUDWIG DOES What is the comparative method entail? Most similar vs. most different study designs? Why are these kinds of studies so useful for isolating causal variables? Methodological issues with “large-n studies” like Ludwig’s – Is it really possible to “systematically” study hundreds of different leaders? What do you end up missing – Why did he not analyze all 1,941 rulers from 199 countries?... Instead of “just” 377? – His sample includes only chief executives. Why is this a problem? – Why not analyze leaders across history? (He concentrates on the 20 th C) – Where does his data come from? Is that a problem?

10. HOW DO PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING LEADERSHIP DIFFER FROM COMPARATIVE STUDIES? Deductive (using observations, comparativists deduce principles from cases) vs. inductive reasoning (using principles, political psychological approaches usually predict a specific leader’s behaviors) Why does the historian or psychologist typically focus on just one leader rather than comparing large numbers? (Not Hermann, though) What kind of evidence do psychological studies of political leadership typically look at? Especially when looking from afar? – The systematic study and mapping of personality types – Early life biography, writing and speeches, interviews – Medical histories – Evidence from the interaction with others

11. WHAT PSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLES MOST INFLUENCE A LEADER’S BEHAVIOR? Motives. What big goals motivate a particular leader? Achieving excellence? Establishing relationships with others or one’s “in- group”? Using power to influence others? Cognitive style and core beliefs/values. How does a particular leader think about problems and make judgments? How does s/he see the world How complex is her thinking and problem solving? How open is she to new and/or contradictory information? How well does she classify problems correctly and draw upon, order, and integrate different sources/types of information? What are this person’s givens? Personality traits (and types, including “disorders,” which are clusters of traits). What habitual elements (e.g. and patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion) drive the leader? Has the leader developed a personality disorder? Examples of traits: agreeableness, distrust/Examples of a disorder: paranoia, obsessive compulsiveness, narcissism