Profiling the personality of populist foreign policy makers: a leadership trait analysis

The burgeoning research into the impact of populism on foreign policy mostly revolves around polarising chief executives, but has still paid little attention to the personality attributes characterising leading agents of populism such as Chávez, Erdoğan, or Trump. The paper therefore uses leadership trait analysis (LTA) to explore to what extent the thoughts and actions of populist foreign policy agency are rooted in particular individual predispositions. As a theoretical contribution, the conceptual tenets of the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism are systematically connected to the personality traits contained in LTA. The developed expectations are empirically tested by profiling a sample of eight populist government leaders from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Overall mixed results indicate that conceptual distinctions between populist and non-populist leaders are not fully reflected at the personality level. Even so, some traits such as high self-confidence and high distrust of others could indeed provide fertile ‘individual ground’ for the observable impact of populism on foreign policy making.