The operational code approach to profiling political leaders: understanding Vladimir Putin

Abstract

Content analytics applied to open source material can assist in understanding, predicting, and influencing the behavior of foreign political leaders. We provide evidence to this effect by profiling Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains a source of consternation to the academic, intelligence, and policy communities. We apply the operational code scheme to a corpus of over one million words spoken by Putin across his time in office, and use the results to adjudicate between the competing portraits of him in the extant literature. We find Putin to hold broadly mainstream beliefs about international politics, albeit qualified by hyper-aggressiveness toward terrorism and a startling preoccupation with political control. His approach is that of an opportunist rather than a strategist. These data represent a stream of information that must be combined with other sources and integrated, through policy judgment, into a comprehensive approach to a foreign political leader.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments, the authors would like to thank Professor Paul Herrnson, participants on a panel at the 2015 Meetings of the International Studies Association, and the Department of Political Science Colloquium Group at the University of Connecticut.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was supported by a Collaborative Research Funds Grant from the Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut.

Notes on contributors

Stephen Benedict Dyson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. He researches the psychology of political leadership, and the intersections of politics and popular culture.

Matthew J. Parent is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He has research interests in international relations theory, foreign policy, and military technology.

Notes

1. Carey, “Teasing Out Policy Insight”; Post, “Leader Personality Assessments”; and Omestad, “Psychology and the CIA.”

2. Duelfer and Dyson, “Chronic Misperception.”

3. Schafer and Walker, Beliefs and Leadership; and Suedfeld et al., “Assessing Integrative Complexity.”

4. Baker, “3 Presidents and a Riddle.”

5. Epstein, “Rogers: Russia Playing Chess.”

6. New York Times Editorial, “The Ruble’s Fall.”

7. Gessen, The Man Without a Face; and Yaffa, “Reading Putin.”

8. Mead, “In It to Win It.”

9. George, Bridging the Gap, 125–131.

10. For a history: Dyson, “Origins of the Psychological Profiling.”

11. Leites, A Study of Bolshevism.

12. George, “The Operational Code.”

13. Ibid., 191.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Holsti, “The Operational Code”; McClellan, “The Operational Code”; and Walker, “The Interface Between Beliefs and Behavior.”

17. Dyson, “Drawing Policy Implications.”

18. Schafer and Walker, Beliefs and Leadership; and Walker et al., “Systematic Procedures.”

19. Suedfeld et al., “Assessing Integrative Complexity,” 346.

20. Hill and Gaddy, Mr. Putin, loc. 3438. For discussion of the issues raised by using public speech to reveal private beliefs, and empirical support for so doing, see: Schafer, “Issues in Assessing Psychological Characteristics”; Renshon, “When Public Statements Reveal Private Beliefs”; and Dyson and Raleigh, “Public and Private Beliefs.”

21. The topics are the United States, NATO, the European Union, China, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia, Ukraine, Chechnya, Terrorism, the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, and a residual category of general foreign affairs. Detailed operational codes for Putin in each of these topic areas are available on request from the authors. We collected and combined both prepared speeches and answers given in response to questions. Arguments have been advanced for focusing on either prepared or spontaneous speech in the study of elite belief systems. Some suggest that prepared speech gives a more precise readout of beliefs as it offers a considered view and is free from the need to respond to the wording or slant of a question, others have countered that prepared speech involves input from speechwriters and offers the opportunity to craft a position that is more for public consumption than a guide to policy. There is no consensus as to which type of speech is more revelatory, and so we kept prepared and spontaneous speech separate in the first round of analysis in order to test for differences between the two modes. Putin did evidence a marginally more cooperative orientation when giving prepared remarks than when responding to questions. However, the differences do not substantially alter the category in which Putin is placed: by shifting slightly in a more cooperative direction in prepared remarks he becomes more similar to the mainstream world leader reference group. In light of the lack of strong theory and the marginal empirical differences between the types of remarks, we combine the two types of material in our measures: doing so gives us sufficient word counts to disaggregate his operational code by topic. Finally, we note that the slightly higher cooperative scores in prepared remarks is likely caused by the pro forma nature of speeches of welcome Putin gives to foreign leaders who visit Moscow. These are ceremonial rather than indicative of policy choices.

22. http://en.kremlin.ru/.

23. We began with quarterly text files, and later made the decision to aggregate into year-long files. Decisions on how to slice up the text files always involve trade-offs between increasing the number of observations (shorter time periods are better) versus ensuring each text file has a sufficient number of words to provide a meaningful read on the subject’s operational code (longer time periods are better). As we were already dividing the text thirteen ways to gain coverage of the range of topics, the annual time period proved most feasible.

24. The contemporary major power leaders (with word counts or published source of operational codes in parentheses) are: Jiang Zemin (Feng 2009); Hu Jintao (He and Feng 2013); Xi Jinping (He and Feng 2013); Tony Blair (230,333 words); Gordon Brown (67,160); George W. Bush (281,955); Bill Clinton (666,956); Barack Obama (148,547); Angela Merkel (29379); Nicholas Sarkozy (50978); Francoise Hollande (33308). The rogue state leaders are: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Malici and Buckner 2008); Bashir al-Assad (Malici and Buckner 2008); Fidel Castro (Malici and Malici 2005); Kim Jong-Il (Malici and Malici 2005); Saddam Hussein (330,062).

25. A view communicated to one of the authors by a senior US intelligence figure. Policy makers are confident, this figure said, that they can handle negotiations with any international figure, even those with whom they profoundly disagree, so long as they know ahead of time that their interlocutor is a mostly rational person.

26. Baker, “Pressure Rising.”

27. Gates, “Putin’s Challenge,” for other studies that paint Putin as a rogue leader, see Weigel, “Lenin Meets Corleone”; Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy; and Gessen, The Man Without a Face.

28. Bueno de Mesquita et al., Logic of Political Survival.

29. Baker, “3 Presidents and a Riddle.”

30. Fish, “Putin’s Path”; Charap, “The Petersburg Experience”; Tsygankov, “New Challenges”; and Sakwa, “Putin’s Leadership.”

31. Burgo, “Vladimir Putin: Narcissist?”; and Araujo et al. “Gunslinger’s Gait.”

32. In line with the goals of the study, we bracket here the academic debate about the constructed nature of social roles such as ‘mainstream’ and ‘rogue’. Instead, we follow Alexander George (1993, 48, 49) in suggesting that Henry Kissinger’s scheme, in his book A World Restored, has utility. Kissinger, George writes, delineated between mainstream states that subscribed to ‘international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy’ and ‘revolutionary’ states (George uses the terms ‘revolutionary’, ‘outlaw’, and ‘rogue’ interchangeably) that reject the norms and practices of the international system.

33. Full operational codes on each topic area available from the authors on request.

34. Ninety-five per cent confidence intervals for hostility/friendliness of political universe in the reference groups: Mainstream leaders .41/.55; Rogue leaders .06/.24. Conflictual/cooperative strategy: Mainstream leaders .56/.64; Rogue leaders .24/.46. Figure 4 reports significance tests of differences between Putin and comparison groups on all operational code indices.

35. We combined his speech on terrorism and on Chechnya for this analysis: he used the terms interchangeably in his speech and his operational codes on the two topics were essentially indistinguishable from one another.

36. Gessen, The Man Without a Face.

37. Rutland, “Putin’s Path to Power,” 32.

38. Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 166, 168.

39. Dyson, “Drawing Policy Implications,” 343.

40. Ninety-five per cent confidence intervals: Mainstream leaders: .21/.31; Rogue leaders: .16/.20.

41. Sarotte, “Putin’s View of Power.”

42. Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 78.

43. Ibid., 79.

44. Judah, Fragile Empire, 13.

45. Hill and Gaddy, Mr. Putin, loc. 2065.

46. Sarotte, “Putin’s View of Power.”

47. Parfitt, “Interview with Gleb Pavlovsky”; and Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 139.

48. Hill, “Putin and Bush”; Dannreuther and March, “Chechnya”; O’Laughlin et al., “A Risky Westward Turn”; Rutland, “Putin’s Path to Power”; Hill, “The Real Reason”; and Marten, “Putin’s Choices.”

49. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis.”

50. Parfitt, “Interview with Gleb Pavlovsky,” 55.

51. Wilson, Ukraine Crisis, loc. 3989.

52. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis.”

53. Shevtsova, “Humiliation.”

54. Marten, “Putin’s Choices,” 189.

55. Grouping together Putin’s annual P-1 scores on U.S., EU, and NATO for 2000–2013 yields 31 observations, the mean of which were compared to the 9 observations for the same topics from 2014–2016. A t-test reveals the difference between the groups is significant at p < .000.

56. To ascertain this, we split Putin’s speech on the three topics at the point of 28 February 2014 (see Salem, Walker, and Harding 2014). We then placed the speech after that date into a ‘post-intervention’ file, giving us 21 months of speech (up to 31 December 2015), and worked back 21 months to create ‘pre-intervention’ files. The results of text analysis of these files are represented in chart 5.

57. McFaul, “Faulty Powers.”

58. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook.

59. Renshon, “When Public Statements”; and Dyson and Raleigh, “Public and Private Beliefs.”

60. Kramer, “Putin Declares.”

61. George, Bridging the Gap, 132–134.