OA lot on their minds. The contextual and personal determinates of leaders’ beliefs

In these polarized times, a key question is whether political compromise and collaboration are still possible and what may stimulate political leaders to go beyond partisanship and narrow self-interest to work together to solve pressing (trans)national crises. Political psychologists have long argued that part of the answer to such questions lies in who these leaders are and what they believe in. A recent study indeed finds that leaders’ beliefs and the extent to which their views and positions overlap determines whether they are willing and able to engage in successful collaborative leadership (Muller and Van Esch 2020). This raises the question as to what determines the content of leaders’ beliefs and to what extent can such factors be influenced to stimulate compromise? Previous studies have identified a range of different factors that are hypothesised to affect the beliefs of political leaders: from macro-level variables like national culture and economic and political interests, via meso-level factors like public opinion, media coverage and the positions of important peers to personal characteristics like career-path, life-events and education. Finally, personality and leadership style are often expected to function as intervening variable influencing leaders’ openness to information and therefore the extent to which their beliefs are determined by contextual or personal factors. The proposed paper uses a new database of 86 cognitive maps of the Heads of state or government and central bank government regarding the Eurozone crisis, leaders’ personal characteristics as well as contextual variables to test the extent to which, and how the different contextual and personal characteristics correlate with the content of leaders’ beliefs.