Personality characteristics of ‘successful’ politicians

The personality traits of many political leaders is important for a number of reasons and some have looked at successful politicians as compared personality traits with the performance of their governments. This showed four personal characteristics on which success of a political leader crucially depends.

• Rationality
• Authoritativeness
• Adventurousness
• Inspiration

They then went on to form a test which scores politicians on these traits (take the test yourself here).  The political performance index ranges from 0% to 100% with the higher score meaning more successful. See full results here

	PerformanceIndex %	Rational %	Authoritarian %	Adventurous %	Inspired %
F.Roosevelt M.Thatcher R.Reagan B.Clinton T.Blair J.Kennedy W.Churchill	93 93 86 83 83 83 79	53 54 53 48 56 47 68	14 32 32 43 11 12 21	0 3 1 10 22 6 5	39 33 26 39 44 24 58

My issue with it is that being ‘successful’ is not an end in itself. While politics is about winning elections, essentially it is about a lot more than that; it is about the fate of the nation, the people, the world. Many of these politicians who have scored highly in this analysis are controversial figures and many will say have made some people’s lives worse.

I am interested in making politics accessible and success meaning we improve the lives of the people in the country (and this has nothing to do with money). Any analysis can only analyse what is being looked at and so some characteristics won’t show up in the results. Maybe if we changed what ‘success’ means and looked for other characteristics we would be looking at a very different list of people.

Therefore my lessons from successful politicians will have a different focus.