Personality and International Politics: Insights from Existing Research and Directions for the Future

This article focuses on personalities, or individual differences, of world political leaders. After arguing that international relations theory has experienced a turn toward decision makers, I briefly overview one of the dominant approaches to the study of leader personality in foreign policy: Leadership Trait Analysis. While this research includes a number of important studies that directly challenge traditional understandings of international relations and engage with international relations theory, I argue that the subfield of personality studies in foreign policy is ripe for new theoretical and methodological developments. In the final section of this article, I outline several specific areas for future research, including a connection between foreign policy-personality approaches and the growing body of work on political leadership.