[chippy]

I'm not so sure about politicians but there have been studies that showed that there are more psychopaths as CEOs and people at the top of businesses. Politicians in reality do a lot of soft people work - more so than a business man would - and they are often more motivated by and need empathy for their job.

[0815test]

Psychopaths do have people skills, if only as superficial, learned behavior. And they have excellent intuition, and perhaps even empathy, of a sort (in that they do seem to have a feel for what others might be going for) for zero-sum, win-lose situations, like politicking. This does come at a cost, of course: they lack pro-social emotions and the ordinary empathy that relates to those; hence, they tend to fail at things like creative negotiation, adaptation and compromise (that are critical to success in win-win scenarios), and to also lack traits like intellectual and social curiosity, openness to experience, a sense for human achievement, for culture and the arts, etc. Maybe even a sense of humour! All-in-all, by and large, they are not good policy-makers - they don't exert what Bernard Crick (a widely-quoted political scientist) called the "political virtues".