The Peter Principle and the Dark Triad: why we have such lousy leaders.

The machinations inherent in modern political parties keep many of the best people away from public life and promote some of the worst.

There are few tougher gigs than being the leader of a nation and none where getting it right is more critical. But the dynamics of political parties tend to filter out the best contenders, promoting the incompetent and encouraging those with the worst personal impulses.

It is not an accident that none of the past six Australian prime ministers, including the present incumbent, have been up to the job. It’s no accident that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss became prime ministers, that Donald Trump became president, that Olaf Scholtz became chancellor of Germany, or that Giorgia Meloni runs the show in Italy.

That’s the way the system works. There are two elements to consider here: the way parties function as hierarchies; and the nature of modern politics that favours so strongly some of the least attractive traits of human personality.

Politics and the Peter Principle

Some time in the 1950s, a Vancouver public school teacher called Laurence Peters began to worry about why so many of the people he saw in positions of authority were so terrible at their jobs. After a while, he saw a pattern. The bungling bosses had, in the lower jobs they previously held, generally done well. He saw it again and again.

Finally he wrote a book, The Peter Principle, which had this as its main theme: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

Eventually, this could become critical: “In time,” Peter wrote, “every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.

It also applies, he noted, to politics: “Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity.”

The Peter Principle was written in a semi-satirical tone, which increased its popularity (it has sold over eight million copies) but lessened its impact in academia. A number of studies around the world have now tested Peter’s hypothesis and found it valid. The Peter Principle is real.

Investigators from the US government’s National Bureau of Economic Research followed the performance of 53,000 sales representatives at 214 companies over six years.

“The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager,” they concluded. “We  find  evidence  consistent  with  the Peter Principle, which predicts that firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance.”

There’s a more recent, related, concept known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after its inventors. It describes how many incompetent people in responsible positions tend to under-estimate their incompetence, hiding it from themselves and (if they can) from others. The validity of the Dunning-Kruger effect has been confirmed in a number of academic studies. It, like the Peter Principle, is real.

Consider the six prime ministers this country has had since John Howard left office in 2007: Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese.

The first five failed comprehensively and were removed either by their colleagues or by the electorate. There is perhaps time for Albanese to reverse his government’s slide into timidity and dithering, to renew a government that the labour movement luminary Bill Kelty said was “mired in mediocrity” and former foreign minister Gareth Evans lamented its “move into cautious, defensive, wedge-avoiding mode”.

If so, Albanese is leaving it a bit late. The election must be held by next May, and the impression of directionless irrelevance is in danger of becoming entrenched.

A competent prime minister would not have allowed matters to deteriorate so far. The core qualities for success in national leadership – particularly for a party with a history of progressive reform – is to inspire the country, to frame and successfully promote a program of sensible and beneficial change, and to get the best out of senior colleagues and the public service.

So far, Albanese has failed on all those grounds. But until he became prime minister, his was a story of political success. He was widely admired for his senior ministry roles in the Rudd and Gillard governments; he earned a reputation as an unparalleled negotiator and parliamentary tactician; and he retained the affection of most of his colleagues in all factions right through the divisive wreckage of the Rudd-Gillard era.

But then he got the top job.

Kevin Rudd was a highly skilled diplomat and, after he was voted out of the Labor leadership, showed he would have been an effective foreign minister in a government led by someone else. But as prime minister, his overweening ego, his inability to deal with others and his failure to turn promises into action created an unworkable, chaotic administration. When he was defeated by Julia Gillard, he industriously undermined her government, putting his selfishness above both party and country and sending Labor into minority government at the 2010 election.

Julia Gillard could have been a decent health minister, the portfolio she shadowed in opposition. Though her administration passed a great deal of legislation against the odds, she was unable to inspire the nation or to instigate a coherent program of reform.

Tony Abbott was one of John Howard’s most skilled and reliable fix-it men: a highly efficient exponent of Howard’s conservative policies in employment, industrial relations and health financing. As opposition leader between 2009 and 2013, he was lethally effective in demolishing the Rudd and Gillard governments, weaponizing Rudd’s mining super-profit tax and killing off action on climate change.

Bomb-throwing got him into the prime ministership at the 2013 election but his career as national leader was disastrous and short. As Laurence Peter pointed out half a century before: “The skills required to run a great political campaign have little to do with the skills required to govern.”

Malcolm Turnbull had been a top-flight barrister and a proficient investment banker, but his skills did not translate into politics. As a centrist, he did not suit the increasing polarisation of the times. He was a natural fit for neither of the major parties and certainly not for the Greens. He might have succeeded as an independent but that would not have delivered the power his ego required.

Turnbull meandered through his prime ministership, powerless to promote a moderate agenda on issues like climate change. He was forced by the dominant right-wing to disappoint centrist voters while failing to satisfy conservatives. His fall was inevitable.

Scott Morrison is an exception to the Peter Principle, which postulates that people getting a top job are those who did well in earlier posts. He was sacked as the head of New Zealand’s tourism agency and again from the corresponding post in Australia. His record as immigration minister was loudly fixated on “stop the boats” but failed utterly to deal with the much bigger issue of unregulated migrants arriving by air, or of the egregious  exploitation of migrant workers by unscrupulous employers and labour-hire companies. As treasurer, he established the Robodebt scheme and bitterly opposed a royal commission into banking before reluctantly commissioning one.

Morrison’s record as prime minister was marked by his lack of empathy during crises (“I don’t hold a hose, mate”), failure to act on sexual misconduct and rape allegations among ministers and ministerial staff, and – farcically – appointing himself to five ministries without telling the public, the parliament or in some cases the incumbent minister.

Morrison’s case points to more than the Peter Principle in action. For that, we must look at the psychology of people attracted to politics and the way political parties enable people with some of the least attractive human traits.

The dark triad

The Dark Triad is a way of categorising closely-related negative characteristics of human personality that, not coincidentally, are over-represented in political life. There are three: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. Some social psychologists add other unpleasant traits, such as “everyday sadism”.

Psychopaths lack the capacity for human empathy and conscience. They typically display boldness, disinhibition, cold-heartedness, remorselessness and egocentricity. They are often personally charming, creating the outward appearance of normality.

Machiavellian personalities excel in manipulating others to their own advantage. They are at their best – or worst – in the Byzantine organisational structures of corporations and political parties. These are the people who follow you into a revolving door and come out ahead.

Narcissists display grandiosity, overweening pride and fragile ego.

All three conditions are marked by an absence of normal human warmth and empathy. Other people exist only to be used and exploited. All people are at the centre of their own universes, but most of us can recognise that other people have universes of their own that are just as significant as ours. Those with dark-triad personalities do not.

The Dark Triad concept does not represent a formal diagnosis of mental illness. Rather, it is an indicator of social dysfunction. In the past few years, there has been a lot of research into how Dark Triad personalities affect political life, and how the nature of politics attracts and favours these people.

A study in the United States found the unpleasantness of the way political parties work prevented many of the best potential candidates from nominating.

“Political candidates,” the researchers found, “must not only possess a desire for a position in government, but also a tolerance for the electoral process typically required to attain it. Recent works suggest that this latter requirement may keep certain types of people out of the potential candidate pool.

“We contend that individuals high in empathic concern are one such type. While compassion for others may make certain aspects of public service attractive, it should also make some of the more negative features of political campaigns repellent.”

Politics in practice is primarily about power and only incidentally about ideas. It is an  inescapable reality that one must be in government, and stay there, to achieve anything; but the getting of power too easily becomes the sole purpose of politics.

The Labor Party’s omnipotent factions rule almost every pre-selection and appointment. They are run by men who may be little known to the voting public and who seldom achieve high office themselves. But the deals the factional warlords make between themselves rule the party. Anyone who is not in a faction is penalised.

An example is Andrew Leigh, former professor of economics at the Australian National University, who has been denied a senior economic portfolio. Instead, as assistant minister for competition, charities and treasury, his name is number 33 out of 42 on the Albanese ministry’s list of seniority.

Another example is the former senator Lisa Singh, by far Tasmanian Labor’s most popular politician, who was relegated to an unwinnable spot because she refused to join a faction.

The factions were born after the Labor split of 1955 and were originally about policy and ideas. As the decades passed, ideas disappeared and power took their place.

More recently, factional warfare has broken out in the Liberal Party, often along religious lines. Right-wing evangelicals are stacking party branches to control pre-selections, a technique previously endemic to the ALP.

Anyone wanting a career in politics must first navigate these labyrinthine corridors, seeking (and therefore owing) favours, subsuming individuality to gain preferment. And at every step through a political career, the factional masters must be obeyed or appeased, sides must be taken when heavyweight figures compete and conflict, and loyalty to those with power replaces loyalty to ideals and to the community purportedly being represented.

Anyone entering politics without the skills of the Dark Triad must quickly acquire them or suffer the consequences.

But these characteristics ae not divided equally along the spectrum of political ideology and are substantially more likely to be found among people who support conservative ideas and parties.

For instance, people lacking personal empathy have been found to be much more likely to be prejudiced against outsiders – immigrants, asylum seekers, sexual minorities and so on. That’s a common factor in conservative politics; progressives, unless they cave in under pressure from the right, are much more likely to be open and accepting. There’s a great deal of academic research showing this.

The authors of a 2021 British study wrote: “Our findings suggest that individuals who have high levels of callousness, shallow affect and deficits in interpersonal functioning have higher levels of social dominance orientation  and right-wing authoritarianism, and these separately predict higher levels of prejudice.”

(Social Dominance Orientation is a personality trait showing a strong identification with hierarchies and domination over lower-status groups.)

A recent study of 2,551 Canadians confirmed previous research about the link between Dark Triad personalities and the political right.

“The findings for political ideology were mostly consistent with previous studies,” the researchers concluded.

“Canadians who placed themselves on the ideological right were lower in openness to experience, honesty–humility, and impulsivity, but higher in extraversion, narcissism, and antisocial tendencies …

“Openness continues to be the most consistent personality trait associated with both ideology and partisanship. In line with previous studies, openness was associated with self-placement on the left of the political spectrum, identification with two left-leaning political parties (New Democratic Party and Greens), and less identification with the Conservative Party of Canada.

“We also confirmed that people higher in honesty–humility were significantly more likely to place themselves on the left of the political spectrum.”

Similar trends were found in Finland. There, researchers found a marked difference in the personalities of people supporting the Greens and those favouring the right-wing Finns Party. Greens supporters scored highly on perspective-taking and Finns Party supporters scored highly on Machiavellianism.

They wrote: “Perspective-taking is needed for seeing things from an out-group perspective and reaching across political divides. Machiavellianism represents cynicism and using others for personal gain.”

Other studies have found strong links between Dark Triad personality types and the use of election material designed to humiliate opponents, support for the US Republican Party, and espousal of totalitarian political regimes.

At their most extreme, Dark Triad personalities who achieve political dominance can threaten not only liberal democracy but civilisation itself. Vladimir Putin is content to send hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths in an attempt to secure his own position. Benjamin Netanyahu is following a disastrous, unwinnable war that has so far killed more than 45,000 people but which has the advantage of keeping him in office and out of prison. Donald Trump poses a massive threat to the future of democracy in the United States, and is the most obvious living exponent of Adolf Hitler’s maxim: “The great mass of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”

There are defences. Australia has a parliamentary system which, unlike a presidential system, does not concentrate executive power in the hands of one person.

But we, like other democracies, depend on two safeguards: voters who pay attention, and journalists who tell the truth. And that gives cause for worry.