Dissertation Defense: Kristine Tockman
Candidate: Kristine Tockman
Major: Government
Advisor: Andrew Bennett, Ph.D.
Title: How Do World Leaders Judge Each Other? The Influence of Personal Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War
This dissertation examines how state leaders shape—and are shaped by—face-to-face, personal diplomacy with each other. I examine two important aspects of their personal interactions. First, I examine the role that the dispositions or psychological traits of state leaders play in their own behavior during these meetings as well as how such traits influence their judgments or attributions of their counterparts’ behavior. Second, I examine the effect of personal meetings themselves on leaders, showing how and why some leaders are more strongly influenced by such meetings than others. Drawing from social and political psychology, I develop a novel typology of leader traits that I find strongly implicate both leader behavior and attributions: self-monitoring (impression management) and epistemic motivation (commitment to rational thought). I hypothesize that these traits would result in systematic differences in negotiating behavior, the types of attributions leaders would be likely to make, and the effect of personal meetings in changing leader attributions.
I test my hypotheses using an in-depth case study on U.S. and Soviet relations at the end of the Cold War. Through archival research and interviews with biographers and individuals present at leader meetings and summits, I examine Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as the relations between George Schultz and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze. I find that as hypothesized, high self-monitors such as Reagan and Shultz displayed similar behavior in their meetings with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze compared to low self-monitor Thatcher: a higher attentiveness to social, emotional and situational cues for their behavior, a higher variability between their private beliefs and arguments they made during negotiations, and a higher attentiveness to their image vis-à-vis the Soviets. I found that Reagan and Thatcher, demonstrating lower epistemic motivation, showed a tendency to make similar dispositional attributions of the Soviets, inferring the cause of Soviet behavior to internal, enduring, trait-like characteristics. George Shultz, who demonstrated higher epistemic motivation, made more situational attributions, inferring the cause of Soviet behavior to a function of external, structural or situational conditions. I also found that personal meetings with Gorbachev influenced both Reagan and Thatcher’s attributions of Soviet behavior more significantly than they did Shultz’s.
Finally, I argue that leaders’ changes in attributions could not be fully explained by the distribution of power, state interests, or domestic politics. Overall, my study adds to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the value of personal diplomacy in international relations scholarship. By showing that personal diplomacy is not necessarily epiphenomenal to power and interests, and leaders are not interchangeable or perfectly substitutable, I highlight the value of examining the dispositions of the individual leaders engaging in it.