The Personality Traits of Populist Leaders and Their Foreign Policies: Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance the study of the nexus of populism and foreign policy by showing the connection between the personality traits of the leader and the foreign policy behavior of the state that they represent. It focuses on the political personality profiles of two populist leaders who can be characterized as antiplural, Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump, as a way to empirically further substantiate the recent research agenda on populism in world politics. The paper builds the two populist leaders’ political profiles through the use of the leader trait analysis approach. It contends that there are patterns in populist leaders’ personalities that can act as key drivers of their noncooperative and conflict-inducing behavior in foreign policy. The results show the characteristics that appear as the strongest predictors of their behavior in the international arena are their low task orientation and high focus on relationships.

Leader trait analysis of Vladimir Putin: A translation studies approach to personality scores in translated English to Russian speech

“…Irrespective of this, initial LTA methodology assumed it was unnecessary to produce different coding schemes for different languages. LTA studies thus either translated a leader's non-English text into English or coded only the texts that the leader had originally given in English (Cuhadar et al, 2017a(Cuhadar et al, , 2017bKesgin, 2020;and Thiers and Wehner, 2021). Manual translation is often timeconsuming and is invariably subjective, while digital translation is quite prone to error.…”

Stereotyped images and role dissonance in the foreign policy of right-wing populist leaders: Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump

“…Trump’s new roles, in tandem with the way he enacted the more permanent ones of the US state, were seen as detrimental to the stability of the international order that it had previously built as global hegemon. Even Trump’s sometimes-erratic behaviour on foreign policy issues, attributed to his personality traits (Drezner, 2020; Thiers and Wehner, 2022), became a constraint on enacting the roles of the US state. In other words, new roles as well as the way other more traditional ones were played and enacted by Trump created role dissonance over the US’ global leader and responsible great power roles.…”

Populists in the shadow of great power competition: Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk in comparative perspective

“…Such has been the focus on parties that when “coalitions” appear in the literature, these are often understood as coalitions of political parties rather than broader social forces and movements (Aslanidis, 2021; Zbíral, 2021). Similarly, given the centrality of charismatic individuals to populism, there has been justifiable interest in first-image studies of the speech acts, psychology, body-behavior styles, and even Tweets of populist leaders (Friedrichs, 2022; Lacatus, 2021; Thiers and Wehner 2022; Sagarzazu and Thies, 2018; Visnovitz and Jenne, 2021). While a focus on parties and individuals is understandable, a preoccupation with these themes means that IR populism overlooks large parts of the world where populism takes root in weak and fragmented party milieus, and indeed sometimes even in avowedly anti-party authoritarian contexts.…”