Track: Case Studies

Abstract

Political leaders, especially heads of state, plays a central role in society. However, their personal qualities and the variation have several consequences for their leadership, ideology, decision making, or performance. This paper will provide a political psychology mini-review of the latest literature in the last five years on the personal qualities of political leaders from various sources and produce summarized results and conclusions based on the findings. The mini-review on political leaders’ personal qualities was conducted by analyzing 15 peer-reviewed journal articles. These articles are summarized in the table below, which contains information about the journal article regarding the title, authors and the year of publication, constructs, samples, main goals of the study, methods and the findings. Various findings were then documented. First, the cultural diversity has a great influence in analyzing political leaders. Secondly, each leader has their own uniqueness, although they have similarities in general in some constructs. Lastly, constructs that are static in nature—such as traits—basically tend to be stable over time, although in certain situations it can experience a temporary change. In conclusion, the present mini-review paper found several updates related to the personal qualities of political leaders.