Is a leader's willingness to use force innate or shaped by experience? This study develops innovative metrics using Bayesian latent variable modeling. By analyzing leaders' backgrounds including past experiences, political ideologies, and psychological profiles, the research creates measures of inherent hawkishness covering 297 global leaders from 1875-2004.

The new framework offers significant improvements over existing proxies in three key areas: it provides stronger construct validity, demonstrates superior predictive accuracy for conflict outcomes, and allows quantification of measurement uncertainty. Each leader's score reflects their underlying propensity toward force regardless of current conflicts.

This approach is flexible enough to incorporate additional data sources while maintaining robustness through Bayesian estimation techniques.