Compare methods

	Comparative Foreign Policy Analysis	Leadership Trait Analysis
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1980
Originator	James Rosenau (CFP); Valerie Hudson and the Foreign Policy Analysis tradition	Margaret G. Hermann
Type	Comparative, multi-level explanation of foreign-policy behavior	Content-analytic personality profiling of leaders
Seminal source	Hudson, V. M. (2005). Foreign policy analysis: Actor-specific theory and the ground of international relations. Foreign Policy Analysis, 1(1), 1–30.	Hermann, M. G. (1980). Explaining foreign policy behavior using the personal characteristics of political leaders. International Studies Quarterly, 24(1), 7–46.
Aliases	Comparative Foreign Policy, CFP Analysis, Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), Comparative Study of Foreign Policy Behavior	LTA, Personality Profiling at a Distance, Hermann Leadership Trait Analysis, Foreign-Policy Leadership Profiling
Related	3	3
Summary	Comparative Foreign Policy (CFP) analysis explains the foreign-policy behavior of states by opening the 'black box' of decision making and comparing how foreign policy is produced across countries, leaders, and contexts. Part of the broader Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) tradition that Valerie Hudson (2005) characterizes as actor-specific theory, it draws on factors at multiple levels — individual leaders, small groups and bureaucracies, domestic society, and the international system — to account for why different states (or the same state at different times) behave as they do. Its hallmark is the systematic comparison of decision processes and outputs.	Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), developed by Margaret Hermann (1980), profiles political leaders' personalities from their spoken words to explain and anticipate foreign-policy behavior. It scores seven characteristics — the belief in one's ability to control events, the need for power, conceptual complexity, self-confidence, distrust of others, in-group bias, and task focus — from patterns in a leader's verbal material, norms them against reference groups, and combines them into broader leadership styles. It is a leading at-a-distance method for assessing leaders who cannot be interviewed or tested directly.