1980, 1988), with highly favorable results. Table 2—in the appendix—summarizes the
coding procedures for the seven characteristics examined in this study.
The LTA coding scheme has been automated and is now available as part of the
ProfilerPlus software package from Social Science Automation (website:
www.socialscienceautomation.com). This automated text analysis software was used in
this study to score the seven leaders on seven key traits. While computer assisted content
analysis is highly reliable in terms of coding the same phrase the same way every time, it
sacrifices some of the validity associated with having a human coder make coding
decisions. Nevertheless, several of the characteristics require absolutely no subjective
judgments (e.g., those for which coding criteria consist of word lists), and the parsing
software underlying ProfilerPlus has become increasingly sophisticated as successive
versions have appeared.
For each Bush administration official, at least 200 interview or press conference
responses (of at least 100 words each) were coded. Fewer interviews were available for
John Kerry, so only 129 of his responses were coded. The last column in Table 3 shows
the exact number of responses coded for each leader. Hermann (1999) recommends at
least 50 responses of 100 words or more per leader, so the quantity of material coded—
even for Kerry—appears to be more than adequate. An effort was made to include
roughly equal numbers of responses from 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
4
Interviews
consisted primarily of appearances on programs such as NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim
Russert, PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.
For President Bush, all major press conferences of his first term were selected, in addition
to a sample of less high profile question-and-answer sessions. For both Bush and Kerry,
Convention