A Note on "Types" of Political Personality: Nuclear, Co-Relational, Developmental.

The article presents a note on "types" of political personality: nuclear, co-relational and developmental. Even a cursory inspection of the literature of the behavioral and social sciences indicates that the term "type" has a less luminous halo than it had when social scientist Carl Jung, for instance, was writing about "Psychological Types". In this article, the authors, however, presume on the syntactic and semantic sophistication of the age and use the term as a convenient label for a pattern that is at once contextual and empirical. The pattern is contextual because it is defined as referring to significant features of the social process; it is empirical because it is expected to sum up findings and to point the way to further research. A "nuclear" type connects a political role with intense predispositions of the total personality. The man who succeeds to an office in which he has no interest is at one end of the scale; the one whose whole life is focused on reaching the Presidency is at the other.