The Relationship Between Political Leader’s Personalities and Regional Social Governance Modernization

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the relationship between the personalities exhibited by party and government leaders and the modernization of regional social governance. It aspires to offer novel insights to empower the local governments of Chinese provinces, thereby assisting them in augmenting the modernization of social governance.

Led by upper echelons theory, we proposed an analytical framework to explore the relationship. We firstly collected the texts of the activity reports of the leaders in 31 provinces of mainland China during the years 2018 to 2020. Their personalities were discerned through the application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and principal component analysis. Integrating the dimensions of processes and outcomes, we then devised an evaluation system to assess the level of regional social governance modernization. The system underwent a comprehensive evaluation employing principal component analysis. Finally, we employed regression analysis and the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) regression analysis to quantitatively assess the effect of political leader’s personalities on the modernization level of regional social governance.

According to our results, the personalities exhibited by political leaders could be classified into six dimensions, aligning with the framework proposed by Holland vocational interest theory. We revealed that the six types of personalities indeed exert influence on the modernization of regional social governance. However, compared to the effect of environmental factors such as economic conditions and the availability of skilled personnel, their explanatory power is relatively weaker. Among the identified personalities, the leaders displaying realistic and research-oriented personalities demonstrate a heightened capacity to yield substantial positive impacts on social governance modernization. Additionally, social personality also plays a discernible role in the context. Furthermore, the amalgamation of political leaders’ personalities illuminates a nuanced picture marked by moderate influence and intricate complexity.