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Society's training of the young, including formal and informal citizenship instruction, character training, and the processes which lead to the development of different personality types, has been seen as an important determinant of adult political behavior by theorists since Plato. In addition, much of our traditional folklore, not to mention much twentieth century literature on personality development, national character, authoritarianism, and electoral preference, points to the utility of examining the individual's early years as one means of illuminating his mature actions.The present paper considers one aspect of the child's political development—the genesis of his attitudes toward political leaders and the possible ways that this developmental process may affect his adult responses to the formal wielders of power. Citizens' orientations to political authority have a complex and imperfectly understood, but obviously important, bearing on the equilibrium of a body politic.Two classes of data will be considered: survey literature giving some indication of how adults respond to political leaders, and results of a study of 659 New Haven public and private school children of widely varying socio-economic status, ranging from fourth- through eighth-graders (about nine to thirteen years of age). Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were administered to this sample between January and March of 1958. Findings from these sources are supplemented by a smaller collection of prolonged interviews with individual children and many informal encounters with groups of school children and teachers over a period of about two years.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.There is a great deal of political activity which can be explained adequately only by taking account of the personal characteristics of the actors involved. The more intimate the vantage, the more detailed the perspective, the greater the likelihood that political actors will loom as full-blown individuals influenced by all of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses to which the species homo sapiens is subject, in addition to being role-players, creatures of situation, members of a culture, and possessors of social characteristics such as occupation, class, sex, and age.To a non-social scientist the observation that individuals are important in politics would seem trite. Undergraduates, until they have been trained to think in terms of impersonal categories of explanation, readily make assertions about the psychology of political actors in their explanations of politics. So do journalists. Why is it that most political scientists are reluctant to deal explicitly with psychological matters (apart from using a variety of rather impersonal psychological constructs such as "party identification," "sense of political efficacy," and the like)? Why is political psychology not a systematically developed subdivision of political science, occupying the skill and energy of a substantial number of scholars?A partial answer can be found in the formidably tangled and controversial status of the existing scholarly literature on the topic. I am referring to the disparate research that is commonly grouped under the heading "personality and politics": e.g., psychological biographies; questionnaire studies of "authoritarianism," "dogmatism," or "misanthropy"; discussions of "national character"; and attempts to explain international "tensions" by reference to individual insecurities. The interpretations made in psychological biographies often have seemed arbitrary and "subjective"; questionnaire studies have encountered formidable methodological difficulties; attempts to explain large-scale social processes in personality terms have been open to criticism on grounds of "reductionism." And beyond the specific shortcomings of the existing "personality and politics" research, a variety of arguments have been mounted suggesting that there are inherent shortcomings in research strategies that attempt to analyze the impact of "personality" on politics. It is not surprising that most political scientists choose to ignore this seeming mare's nest.If progress is to be made toward developing a more systematic and solidly grounded body of knowledge about personality and politics, there will have to be considerable clarification of standards of evidence and inference in this area.' My present remarks are merely a ...

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