Leadership Trait Analysis

Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) places individual decision makers front and center. Actors like presidents or prime ministers are considered key drivers of foreign policy processes and outcomes, and structural or environmental factors become meaningful only based on leaders' perception and handling of them. More specifically, LTA represents an "at-a-distance" assessment technique which develops profiles of foreign policy decision makers based on their verbal utterances. It offers a three-tiered conceptual framework which comprises seven leadership traits, three intermediary dimensions, and eight leadership styles. LTA has been widely used in empirical analysis, covering a broad range of foreign policy processes and outcomes. The advent of automated coding schemes has rendered the identification of traits both more reliable and efficient. The availability of a "norming group" of close to 300 world leaders makes LTA an ideal tool for comparative analyses.