Description
Understanding the dispositions of individuals has long been
an area of interest to scholars of International Relations, from exploring the role of political psychology of state leaders to understanding foreign policy decision-making, with applied scholarship on identifying different types of dispositions, attitudes and personality traits. However, the existing literature on identifying dispositions to trust is severely lacking,
constraining scholars seeking to understand how these dispositions interact with the social interactional models of trust seen in the literature on face-to-face diplomacy and the interpersonal paradigms of IR. The paper proposes five proxies that can be used to identify individuals as either generalised or particularised trustors: i) political ideology; ii) worldview; iii) foreign policy stance; iv) mental attitude; v) perception of risk. To demonstrate the general utility of the proxies and how they can be used to examine individuals—including, but not exclusively, state leaders—the paper applies them to five key individuals involved in the 1992-1993 Oslo Channel between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Overall, the paper seeks to provide a framework for future scholars to analyse individuals in both single- and comparative-case studies, both historical and contemporary.
