Human Development and Political Leadership: The Influence of Personal History on Foreign Policy Decision.

学者、政策制定者和选民都想当然地认为，总统、总理和其他高管的生活经历会深刻影响他们上任后的行为方式。例如，在上次总统选举中，我们将约翰·麦凯恩作为战斗机飞行员和越南战争战俘的背景与巴拉克·奥巴马作为社区组织者和法学院教授的经历进行了比较，试图预测这些经历将如何影响他们上台后的行为。然而，有些令人惊讶的是，大多数国际冲突研究主要关注系统和国家层面的变量，不一定是因为这些变量具有最大的解释力，而是因为这些变量目前存在数据。我们的研究通过将分析重点转向领导人及其个人发展背景，挑战了传统国际关系研究的假设。做决定的不是机构，而是人民。领导者在可预测和系统的动机、激励、目标和愿望的背景下做出选择，包括个人和职业。越来越多的比较政治学和国际关系方面的文献聚焦于国家领导人的属性，以及领导风格和能力的变化可能影响国际政治的方式。通过关注领导人，我们的研究项目对国际政治的新现实主义或国内制度范式提出了强有力的挑战。我们认为，领导者的个人特征之所以具有决定性的差异，正是因为他们之间的背景、准备和心理差异。特别是，我们认为，在涉及国家间冲突的情况下，个体背景差异会影响相对的风险承担和能力。我们研究了哪些因素最能预测领导人承担高水平政策风险的意愿，以及哪些因素最能预测国家间危机背景下领导人的能力和敏锐判断。我们通过开发和使用一个独特的数据集来测试这些命题，该数据集包含了1879年至2004年间全球领导人的教育、家庭结构、年龄以及军事和职业背景等因素。我们研究了这些力量对国家间争端的启动和升级以及相关战争的结果和成本的影响。系统地测试国际关系学术中所谓的“第一形象”变量，将在国际关系文学和外交政策的文献中发挥重要作用。我们的研究有可能在许多学科中引发越来越多的争论，包括政治学、心理学、进化生物学、遗传学等。我们的数据将成为未来学者研究领导者的背景经历如何影响他们在许多领域的行为的轨迹。虽然我们主要关注武装冲突的开始和升级，但其他学者将能够利用我们的研究来研究领导人背景如何影响经济和社会政策选择等问题，以及许多其他问题。

Academics, policy makers, and the electorate all take as given that the life experiences of presidents, prime ministers, and other executives profoundly affect the way they will behave once in office. In the last presidential election, for example, we compared John McCain's background as a fighter pilot and POW in the Vietnam War to Barack Obama's experiences as a community organizer and law school professor to try to anticipate how those experiences would shape their behavior once in office. Somewhat surprisingly, however, most international conflict research focuses primarily on system and state-level variables, not necessarily because those are the variables with the largest explanatory power, but because those are the variables for which data currently exists. Our research challenges the assumptions of traditional international relations research by turning the analytic focus to leaders and their personal developmental backgrounds. Institutions do not make decisions, people do. Leaders make their choices within a context of predictable and systematic motivations, incentives, goals, and desires, both personal and professional. A growing literature within comparative politics and international relations spotlights the attributes of national leaders and the way variations in leadership style and ability may affect international politics. By focusing on leaders, our research program represents a powerful challenge to the neo-realist, or domestic institutional paradigms of international politics.We argue that the personal characteristics of leaders vary in decisive ways precisely because of background, preparatory, and psychological differences between them. In particular, we suggest that individual differences in background affect relative risk taking and competence in situations involving interstate conflict. We investigate the factors that best predict leaders willingness to entertain high levels of policy risk, and what factors best predict competence and keen judgment in the context of interstate crises. We test these propositions by developing and employing a unique data set encompassing factors such as education, family structure, age, and the military and occupational background of leaders across the globe from 1879-2004. We examine the influence of these forces on the initiation and escalation of interstate disputes and the outcomes and costs of associated wars. Systematically testing what are called "first image" variables within international relations scholarship, will serve an important role within the literatures on international relations literature and foreign policy. Our research has the potential to contribute to growing debates across a number of academic disciplines, including political science, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, and others. Our data will serve as a locus for future research by scholars interested in how the background experiences of leaders shape their behavior in a number of areas. While we are primarily concerned with the initiation and escalation of armed conflicts, other scholars will be able to use our research to study how leader backgrounds influence things like economic and social policy choices, as well as a host of other issues.