Princeton University

Specialization:

Fred Irwin Greenstein, (born September 1, 1930) is best known for his contributions to the systematic study of political psychology and for its application to presidential decision-making and leadership. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1960 and did postdoctoral study at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1961-62). After an initial appointment at Yale (1959-62), he taught at Wesleyan University (1962-73). Greenstein settled in Princeton University in 1973 and is the director of its Program in Leadership Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has held several visiting professorships. He has served as secretary of the American Political Science Association and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During his graduate education at Yale, Greenstein studied under three leading scholars of political psychology: Robert E. Lane, Harold Dwight Lasswell, and Nathan Leites. His early work in the field led to such books as Children and Politics and Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization. The former work represents one of the early ventures in political socialization and one of the first collections of data on children's early political development. He examined conceptions of political authority held by children between the ages of nine and thirteen, the development of political information and party attachments, and differences in political learning based on social class and gender. The work's major thesis is that significant aspects of an adult's political behavior have their genesis in the child's early political learning. Greenstein set forth the key components of a research agenda in political socialization, which included the social and psychological characteristics of the individuals socialized, what people learn (specifically political learning including their roles as subjects and citizens), the agents of socialization, the circumstances of their socialization (conscious or unconscious, deliberate or incidental, the sequence of learning), the effects of learning on the individual's later behavior and on the political system itself. The underlying assumption in Personality and Politics is that personality attributes frequently influence the activities of political participants. From this is follows that theory building in political science requires a systematic study of personality and politics. Greenstein's work represents a major effort to untangle the methodological and theoretical problems that had hampered such inquiry. The book's subtitle makes explicitly its key concerns: problems of evidence, inference, and conceptualization in carrying out studies in personality and politics. Greenstein provided two heuristically useful ways for classifying the field's literature. The first tripartite classification was based on the size of the population to which psychological attributes are ascribed: case histories of single political actos, typological studies to summarize a wide range of political personalities, and accounts of aggregative effects of individual personality characteristics on the functioning of political institutions. His second three-fold division of the literature was related to the analytic tasks it undertook: phenomenology (the description of the observed pattern of behavior), dynamics (the explanatory operation of how individuals or types with different personality clusters function), the genesis (the uncovering of how the individuals or types came to be the way they are). In the 1980s, Greenstein applied efforts in political psychology to inquiries about American presidents and their advisers. The dynamics of effective presidential leadership and successful presidential decision-making are the two themes that dominate his presidential work. In The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader, Greenstein attributed part of the public's discontent with presidential performance to the conflict built into the Constitution between the president's apolitical and unifying role as chief of state and his partisan and divisive role as head of government. Greenstein found that Dwight D. Eisenhower was able to bridge the built-in contradictions of the office and provide an effective leadership style. In his analysis of Eisenhower, Greenstein focused on three classes of variables: the personal properties of the man, his leadership strategies, and his organizational style. Eisenhower's political psychology exhibited antithetical qualities in public and private, a duality well suited for adapting to contradictory public expectations. His leadership strategies involved making his job as chief of state readily visible while covertly exercising much of his public leadership. In parallel fashion, his organizational style focused public attention on the formal machinery but left unpublicized his use of informal organization. Post Script: Since the publication of this biographical sketch, Greenstein published The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton (The Free Press 2000, paperback with an afterword on George W. Bush, Princeton University Press, 2001). In it he distills his study of the modern presidents in a series of accounts of their personal development and the principal events of their presidencies. Of each he asks six questions: What were their strengths and weaknesses in the realms of communication with the public, organization of the presidency, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style and emotional intelligence? He has since gone on to explore the leadership qualities and political contexts of the pre-modern presidents.

PhD, Yale University

Link to: Personal Web site