Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2009 erstellt
Description:
This paper seeks to understand what political leaders do. It asks four specific questions: (1) what do leaders in the political realm do, in terms of both purposes and techniques for pursuing those purposes?; (2) what variation is there in what leaders do?; (3) what factors underpin this variation?; (4) what are the consequences of such variation? The paper pursues answers to these questions through two stages. It begins by developing a theoretical framework for understanding the techniques that leaders may employ, drawing on a wide survey of writings on political leadership in the fields of policy, leadership, and presidency studies to present a classification of leadership techniques. It then uses empirical analysis to explore the possibility of making empirical generalizations regarding these leadership techniques. We focus on three case studies of policy-making in rich Anglophone countries, looking at (1) the politics of electoral reform in New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom; (2) economic policy-making in the United States under Richard Nixon; and (3) the search for peace in Northern Ireland, particularly in the 1980s. On these bases, we highlight three factors that appear in particular to shape variation in the nature of political leadership: the nature of the policy area; the offices that leaders occupy; and the individual character of leaders themselves. We identify two types of leadership: moral and instrumental. We argue that the greatest success in leadership can be achieved by combining these, but that such combination is difficult: none of the leaders we study do it entirely successfully