Cognitive Tests for Political Leaders

For almost every safety-sensitive occupation, society insists on some objective demonstration of competence. We license pilots, credential surgeons, examine engineers, require and monitor air-traffic controllers.  Plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians need to have documented apprenticeship experience, pass exams, in order to get their "ticket" or certification.  To get a driver's license, you need to pass a practical exam.  

Yet for the offices that command armies, shape economies, negotiate wars, appoint judges, and influence public health for hundreds of millions, we often require nothing beyond age, citizenship, residency, and electoral success. In a democracy, winning support from the voters is essential, but so is the basic idea that our leaders should have basic competency to perform their tasks safely.   A republic is not a talent show, and a head of government is not merely an entertainer. 

“Competence” is not one thing. There is the most basic medical level:  is the person suffering from dementia, delirium, or another major impairment preventing safe functioning?   But there is also higher-order competence: reasoning ability, breadth of knowledge, grasp of institutions, capacity to weigh evidence, and judgment under social and moral pressure. 

A political candidate should not have to pass some official exam in order to appear on the ballot. That would invite obvious democratic and legal objections. The better idea is disclosure. Require candidates for the highest offices to undergo a standardized, transparent battery of cognitive and judgment-oriented assessments, and then release the results to the public in full. Let voters decide what to do with the information. That approach preserves democratic choice while reducing one of democracy’s recurring absurdities: the spectacle of candidates certifying their own brilliance and expecting the public to take their word for it.

What should such a battery include? First, some broad measure of general cognitive ability.  A standard Wechsler IQ test would be reasonable.  Second, a structured fund-of-knowledge component: not trivia, but basic competence in history, constitutional structure, economics, science, and world affairs. The simplest example could be administering the same civics exam given to new immigrants seeking to become citizens through the naturalization process; it would be a curious irony if a prospective president had difficult passing a citizenship exam.   Third, a situational judgment component modeled on tools such as CASPer, which is designed to assess how people reason through difficult interpersonal and ethical situations rather than merely what facts they can recite. The attraction of a CASPer-like approach is precisely that leadership failure is often less about raw cognitive deficit than about impulsiveness, vanity, rigidity, cruelty, gullibility, or the inability to think through conflict without narcissistic injury. 

A major world leader boasted that he had a perfect score on the MoCA test.  But of course, the MoCA is a screening test for dementia, and is not a measure of intellectual process.  The fact that a public figure would boast about "acing" the MoCA is itself evidence of an abnormality in understanding and judgment.  

If I had to make a prediction, there are major leaders in the world today who I suspect would have very low scores on these standardized tests of intellect, fund of knowledge, and social judgment.  Perhaps at the 25th percentile or below overall, and with some particular areas at the 10th percentile or below.  But this is just a prediction--it would need to be confirmed with testing data.  

There would be problems with this approach.   A testing regime could become elitist, over-coached, or culturally narrow. It could flatter the prejudices of the credentialed classes while missing what politics also requires: stamina, courage, coalition-building, rhetorical force, and moral seriousness. Even the psychometrics are not perfect. That is why such tools should not be used as a blunt pass-fail system. Yet they should inform the electorate. 

If such a system were ever built, its legitimacy would depend almost entirely on procedure. The design would have to be approved by a genuinely bipartisan  (or multi-partisan) commission, with unanimous sign-off from neutral experts in neuropsychology, psychometrics, constitutional law, ethics, and public administration. The instruments, scoring rubrics, security procedures, and interpretive framework should all be public. Results should be reported as a profile, not as a single score: cognitive intactness, reasoning, fund of knowledge, and situational judgment separated rather than collapsed into a single number. The public is capable of seeing that a candidate might be average in abstract reasoning yet excellent in judgment, or bright in the narrow psychometric sense yet impulsive, humorless, or socially incompetent. I think this type of evaluation could improve the overall safety and stability of the world.