Where "Does" the Buck Stop?: Assessing the Impact of Presidential Personality

Personality studies of important political figures have generally relied on either detailed but idiosyncratic case historical methods or the more rigorous but potentially misleading content analysis of a subject's public statements or writings. This paper employs a comparatively new method of personality assessment to evaluate the personality of postwar U. S. presidents. A Q-sort analysis produces a personality profile for each of six U. S. presidents and permits a comparison of these profiles with criterion profiles for presidential openness, effective leadership, and optimally adjusted personality. The Q-sort data provide no support for the hypothesis that a president's personality is related to his overall greatness rating by historians, but the data are consistent with the hypothesis that presidents rated high on openness may also exhibit greater integrative complexity in their policy deliberations during international crises.