Analyzing the Personality of Party and Government Leaders: A LDA Topic Model

Abstract

Purpose/Significance: Personalities of party and government leaders play a pivotal role in shaping their preferences, attitudes, and conduct in the context of strategic decision-making. The analysis of personality carries substantial implications for the assessment and selection of leadership cadres. The study endeavors to introduce an innovative method for scrutinizing the personalities of party and government leaders, leveraging the technological topics generated through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model.Methods/Procedures: Anchored in the theory of personality behavior, the study posits that discernible topics can be extracted from news reports that document the political activities of party and government leaders. These discerned topics can be employed to make inferences about their personalities. Consequently, we systematically amassed news reports chronicling the political engagements of 62 party and government leaders spanning 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in mainland China, covering their tenures in office up to 2021. Based on the LDA model, we conducted an analysis to uncover the dimensional structure of their personalities, incorporating techniques such as topic clustering and common factor extraction.Results/Conclusions: The study effectively identified six distinct personalities that correspond with Hollander's views on occupational personality. The development gave rise to a theory that specifically addresses the personalities exhibited by party and government leaders. Spatial analysis validated the presence of a spatial aggregation effect, underscoring the validity of our framework. Our study can provide implications for the training, evaluation, and designation of party and government leaders in the future.