Cross-cultural comparison of political leaders' operational codes

Abstract

This study aims at comparing operational codes (namely, philosophical and instrumental beliefs about the political universe) of political leaders from different cultures. According to Schwartz (2004), cultures can be categorised into 3 dimensions: autonomy–embeddedness, egalitarianism–hierarchy and mastery–harmony. This study draws upon the 1st dimension (akin to the most popular cultural dimension of Hofstede: individualism–collectivism) and focuses on comparing the leaders of autonomous and embedded cultures based on how cooperative/conflictual they are. The main research hypothesis is as follows: the leaders of embedded cultures would be more cooperative than the leaders of autonomous cultures. For this purpose, 3 autonomous cultures (the UK, Canada and Australia) and embedded cultures (Singapore, South Africa and Malaysia) cultures were chosen randomly and the cooperativeness of the correspondent countries' leaders were compared after being profiled by Profiler Plus. The results indicated that the leaders of embedded cultures were significantly more cooperative than autonomous cultures after holding the control variables constant. The findings were discussed in the light of relevant literature.