The previous chapter presented the popular history of American political leadership. Here we apply our analytical tools to study the reputations of the rest of the world's leaders. We are particularly interested in understanding the factors that shape our perceptions of other places, such as size, economics, and culture.

Knowing the who's who of a country is helpful to understand what's what. In the same way that speaking a trivial amount of the local language (“excuse me”) can pay big dividends, we have found that knowing the name of the current or iconic political leader opens doors to greater understanding. Asking immigrants or locals “What do you think of …?” is an excellent way to start a revealing conversation. We provide tables identifying the dominant political figure from essentially every country on earth. These can be seen as crib notes in cultural literacy; a chance to refresh our memories about the people who built or led nations.

Analyzing Political Leadership

In the course of our study, we have created a dataset of more than 3,000 modern national leaders from more than 150 different countries. But any meaningful attempt to identify the “most significant” leader of a nation faces several issues of definition and bias. We discuss some of these considerations here.

CULTURAL AND REGIONAL BIAS

Our analysis relies on datasets that inherently display linguistic and cultural biases. Both our Wikipedia analysis and book Ngrams data are based exclusively on English-language sources, and hence do not equally reflect the contributions of other languages and cultures.