Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief

Goldfien, Michael A.; Joseph, Michael

doi:10.1080/09636412.2023.2200203

Security Studies

2023

DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2023.2200203

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Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief

Michael A. Goldfien¹,

Michael Joseph²

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Cited by 3 publications

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“…2.This study of the background characteristics of ambassadors also contributes to literature on elite biographies in IR (Krcmaric et al 2020; Horowitz and Fuhrmann 2018), as well as more recent work that seeks to understand how those biographies are likely to be perceived abroad (Goldfien and Joseph 2023; Byun and Carson 2023; Goldfien et al forthcoming). …”

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confidence: 85%

Just Patronage? Familiarity and the Diplomatic Value of Non-Career Ambassadors

Goldfien

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Career diplomats have expertise. Why, then, do U.S. presidents appoint relative novices to key diplomatic posts? Conventional wisdom points to patronage. Yet this explanation overlooks the benefits of a diplomat’s familiarity with political superiors. Inherent in delegated diplomacy is uncertainty over diplomats' ability to “deliver” on understandings reached at the negotiating table. Non-career diplomats often speak more credibly for political superiors, creating an incentive for foreign counterparts to engage in diplomacy. I theorize a tradeoff between familiarity and expertise to generate empirically testable prediction. Counterintuitively, I expect that presidents often sacrifice professional expertise to delegate important diplomatic assignments to relative amateurs, even accounting for the patronage value of the post. I find empirical support for the argument using a novel dataset on U.S. ambassadorial appointments from the Reagan through Trump administrations.

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Just Patronage? Familiarity and the Diplomatic Value of Non-Career Ambassadors

Goldfien

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

Carson,

Min,

Van Nuys

2024

Int Org

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How do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

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When do leader backgrounds matter? Evidence from the President’s Daily Brief

Goldfien,

Joseph,

Krcmaric

2023

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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A wave of recent scholarship shows that the backgrounds of political leaders shape their behavior once in office. This paper shifts the literature in a new direction by investigating the conditions under which foreign observers think a leader's background is relevant. We argue that pre-tenure biographical attributes are most informative to outsiders during leadership transitions—unique periods where the new ruler does not yet have a track record—because a leader's background provides clues about how that leader might govern. But as time passes, foreign observers quickly discount the leader's biography and instead evaluate the leader's observable behavior. We test our theory by creating a systematic daily measure of attention to foreign leader backgrounds derived from the President's Daily Brief, a novel data source of 4991 recently declassified reports from the Central Intelligence Agency to the American president.

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Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Just Patronage? Familiarity and the Diplomatic Value of Non-Career Ambassadors

Just Patronage? Familiarity and the Diplomatic Value of Non-Career Ambassadors

Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

When do leader backgrounds matter? Evidence from the President’s Daily Brief

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