Political Leadership Research Paper

1. The Two Meanings Of The Terms ‘Leader’ And ‘Leadership’

The terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are understood in two particular ways. First, the terms are used in an institutional sense to mean the equivalent of officeholding. Here, they are merely shorthand ways of referring to people who hold particular positions of authority. So, for example, reference might be made to the president as the leader of the United States (US) or to a person having been elected to the leadership of the British Conservative Party. Second, the terms are also used in a behavioral sense to mean a certain type of relationship which occurs between the various members of a particular group. In this case, the ‘leader’ is the person who is able to convince the other members of the group to follow a particular course of action and ‘leadership’ refers to the process of interaction between the leader and the followers. In this sense, leadership is a reciprocal and essentially noncoercive relationship.

The fact that the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ can be used in these two different ways means, first, that leadership does not have to be exercised by leaders and, secondly, that there can be leaders who do not lead. The first of these initially perplexing statements refers to the situation where leadership in the behavioral sense is exercised by someone who does not occupy a formal position of authority. For example, social movements are often formed by individuals who are able to articulate demands which are latent within a community. By creating a sense of mutual purpose towards a particular goal, political leadership is present. However, it is often exercised in this case by unelected people who do not hold any formal office. Such people are, as Tucker (1981) puts it, non-constituted leaders, Martin Luther King being a prime example. The second statement refers to the situation where people who occupy formal positions of authority are unable to convince others that a particular course of action should be followed. These people are still office-holders and, thus, are leaders in the institutional sense of the term, but they are unable to influence others and exercise leadership in the behavioral sense of the word. One writer has suggested that ‘headship’ rather than ‘leadership’ might best describe the relationship between the leader and the other members of the group in this type of situation (Kellerman 1984).

2. The Study Of Political Leadership

The study of political leadership reflects the two basic understandings of the term.

The first type of leadership studies examines the roles and powers of office-holders. The study of political leadership in this sense is intrinsically bound up with the fields of constitutional law, public administration, and government generally. Thus, the focus of inquiry is very broad. Amongst other things it includes country-specific or comparative studies of government figures at the central and subcentral level, the powers of state officials and party leaders, the profiles of elected representatives and political appointees, as well as the conduct of electoral campaigns and political contests. As befits the generality of this type of leadership studies, the subject may also be approached from a variety of methodological standpoints, behavioral, rational choice, and/or institutional. The result is a rich and very varied literature indeed. Classic examples include Neustadt (1965) and Linz and Valenzuela (1994).

The second theme in the work of political leadership concerns the study of how and why leadership in the behavioral sense comes about, if at all. This aspect of the literature is somewhat more specialized. It is also more informed by work in other disciplines, especially social psychology and business and management studies.

The earliest studies of this type suggested that leaders were born not made. They were said to possess innate qualities which set them apart from others and which meant that they had a natural gift for bringing about followership and, thus, for creating history (Carlyle 1907—written in 1840). This approach, however, subsequently was opposed. Leaders, it was argued, were imprisoned by social forces with events being determined by the impersonal interplay of social and cultural forces over which individuals had little or no control (Spencer 1884). These two mutually exclusive approaches have long since been superseded. There is now general agreement that the study of political leadership should be approached from an interactionist perspective (Greenstein 1992). That is to say, the extent to which individuals are able to influence the political process is considered to be contingent upon the interaction between individuals and the environment in which they find themselves. Whether or not people who hold official positions of authority are able to affect the behavior of others depends on the qualities of the people concerned and the circumstances with which they are confronted at any given time.

Contemporary examples of this type of leadership studies have concentrated overwhelmingly on the first element of the interactionist approach, namely the motivations of individual political leaders. One aspect of this work concerns the long-standing issue of whether or not certain personality traits (such as intelligence or appearance) are positively correlated with successful leadership. The findings suggest that the importance of traits is situationally specific (Van Fleet and Yukl 1989). Another aspect relates to the concept of leadership styles, meaning the rigorous classification of the different ways in which leaders tackle the tasks before them. The most well-known example of this sort is Barber’s study of the US presidential character (Barber 1972). One of the main reasons for the interest in Barber’s thesis was because it appeared to have predicted that Richard Nixon would not be a success as president. So far, though, it has yet to be applied systematically outside the context of US politics. A further aspect relates to the work on political psychology. The literature in this subfield is very broad, but of particular interest to leadership studies is the work on psychobiography, or the explanation of political events in terms of an explicit theory of personality. A fine example of this approach is the study of Woodrow Wilson by George and George (1956).

All told, the study of political leadership encompasses a wide variety of work which approaches the subject from many different perspectives. This is, of course, a strength. That said, one of the weaknesses of the literature as whole is the absence of a unifying theory, never mind contending theories. The nature of the subject matter is such that it scarcely lends itself to such a grand project.

3. The Future Of Leadership Research

In one sense the study of political leadership has gone somewhat out of vogue. The behavioral studies of the 1960s and 1970s proved to be less than compelling in their attempts to identify the essence of the concept. Indeed, it is perhaps telling that one of the most influential books of this era (Burns 1978) appears to have had a greater impact among students of management than within the political science community itself. In another sense, though, the study of political leadership is central to some of the most basic puzzles of political science: the relationship between structure and agency, between individual and collective action, between free will and determinism. Thus, there is still great scope for the advancement of this subfield. In this context, there are some specific research agendas to be promoted. Rejai and Philips (1997) note seven such areas: agreement about the definition of leadership; classifications of types of leaders; studies of women leaders; refining the distinction between leaders and elites; studies of minority and third-world leaders; the nature of crisis leadership; and the determinants of leadership duration. More generally, though, there is perhaps an even more urgent need to integrate the leadership factor into both rational choice analysis and the ‘new’ institutionalism. In terms of the former, to what extent does leadership affect preference formation and the articulation and definition of political choices? In terms of the latter, to what degree does leadership affect the creation of institutions and the process of institutional change? In these ways, the study of political leadership has the potential to continue to be at the heart of the political science project for the foreseeable future.

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