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Are leaders perceived as important actors during conflict, or are they discounted because of domestic institutions and international structure? We exploit recently declassified CIA President’s Daily Briefs to construct a cross-national, weekly measure of how intelligence analysts perceive foreign leader importance in conflict and diplomacy. We estimate perceptions of leader importance at crisis onset, crisis escalation, war, and war termination in over 16,000 statistical models that overcome selection and endogeneity concerns common in existing studies of leadership and conflict. Leaders are not perceived to matter equally at every stage of conflict. They are seen to matter most during crisis negotiations when conflicts can either de-escalate to peace or escalate to war. But they are not perceived to matter for crisis onset. We find that leaders of heavily constrained regimes are seen as no more important at any stage of the conflict process than they are in peacetime. Leaders of moderately constrained regimes are perceived to matter for crisis escalation. Finally, leaders of weakly constrained regimes are seen as important at nearly every stage of conflict relative to peacetime. Our findings suggest that even if leaders are perceived to matter for conflict on average, domestic institutions and international structure plausibly constrain leaders more at some stages of the conflict process than others. We contribute to the quantification of historical documents by illustrating how researchers can combine data selection, historiography, measurement, and statistical modeling to draw stronger inferences.

Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief