Replication Data for: Individual Leaders and the State: The Case of Israel as a Complex Adaptive System

When Nathan Leites conceived of the Operational Code in 1951, he viewed it as the social-psychological construction of the state. Individuals in the Soviet Politburo did not operate based upon their own idiosyncrasies, but in similar ways that were derived from Lenin. However, much of the field of political psychology in IR has focused only on individual-level psychology, leaving out the social construction. In this paper we return to the idea of states as social entities that involve discussions, negotiations, and the influence of many people within a complex adaptive system (cas) made manifest as the “psychology of the state.” Many testable hypotheses emerge about continuity of the state’s psychology within and across administrations over time re: learning effects due to external causes (object appraisal); steering effects due to internal causes (ego defense); social interaction effects from learning and steering processes (self-other mediation).

We investigate these possibilities by looking at the manifest psychology of the state across three disparate Israeli leaders: Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu. We use standard at-a-distance psychological assessments, based upon verbal materials, and employ the two most prolific psychological constructs in the field: Operational Code Analysis (cognition), and Leadership Trait Analysis (personality). The dependent variables in our analysis are key OCA beliefs of Israeli leaders about the nature of the political universe (friendly/ hostile), the most effective strategies for exercising power (cooperation/conflict), and historical control (low/high). The independent variables are LTA traits of Israeli leaders regarding the psychological processes of object appraisal (terrorist attacks and fatalities), ego defense (mistrust and self-confidence/), and mediation of self-other relations (task v. process orientation and belief in ability to control events). Our sources are the Global Terrorism Data Base and the Psychological Characteristics of Leaders data set. They are analyzed within the context of game theory models of complex adaptive systems (cas).