How Leaders Matter

Abstract

Explaining the importance of studying leaders in an international relations context requires returning to a topic briefly mentioned previously, the treatment of leaders in existing international relations research. Current scholarship generally understates the importance of leadership in determining countries’ foreign policy goals and strategies. While political scientists generally recognize that leaders can and do shape a state's foreign policy, they have also been deeply skeptical that there is anything systematic in the ways we can understand leaders’ personal preferences in world politics. For the past sixty years, these scholars have focused on the ways in which political institutions and the distribution of power within the international system shape states’ choices, and in so doing, they have largely ignored leaders. At the same time, the general trend among historians has been to focus less on political leaders and diplomatic history and more on social movements and previously underrepresented groups within societies. While the shift in academic focus away from leaders was originally a reaction to psychoanalytic arguments that lacked nuanced data, it has led many to ignore numerous studies of individual leaders’ policy preferences and the psychological foundations of those beliefs. The turn to social history has therefore come at a cost: an entire generation of academics and students has little appreciation of the ways – both idiosyncratic and systematic – leaders shape the world in which we live.