Leadership and Uncertainty Management in Politics

Leaders, Followers and Constraints in Western Democracies

François Vergniolle De Chantal, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Agnès Alexandre-Collier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137439246
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Through a range of international case studies from the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy, this text assesses the conditions necessary for effective leadership and emphasizes the part played by uncertainty and division amongst followers.

1

Introduction

Agnès Alexandre-Collier and François Vergniolle de Chantal

Leadership is a prime example of this iron law of political life: nothing meaningful can happen without someone in charge. The charismatic personality that Max Weber (1922) emphasized as one form of legitimacy is the core of democratic politics for better or worse. Leadership is thus the result of both necessity and opportunity. Structural changes and collective evolutions are necessary but never sufficient. The crucial element is the ability of leaders to use them. In The Prince (1513), Machiavelli wrote that ‘fortuna’ was the strongest ally of the leader. The politics of leadership is a constant reminder of this founding insight. Successful leadership results from the encounter between extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary (wo)men.

At the same time, political leadership, the very gist of politics, is a constant challenge to political science. It raises countless issues of fundamental value for the discipline – from legitimacy to agency, including charisma or electoral competition – but it remains on the margins of the field. This stands in stark contrast with the visibility of leadership as a general skill that can be taught and understood. American academia, for instance, has produced numerous books and articles intended for a general readership on its practice; in addition, so-called ‘Leadership Schools’ (usually associated with ‘Public Policy’ studies) loom large in the American educational field. Political science publications, however, are few and far between. James McGregor Burns’ (1978) largely remains the standard analysis with its account of leadership as a relationship whose key is the discovery of shared purpose between followers and leaders.¹ Burns also made a distinction that still constitutes a dominant framework to account for what leadership is. The central distinction is between what he called ‘transactional’ and ‘transforming’ leadership. Transactional leadership takes place when ‘one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things’. This type of leadership is best described as the politics of exchange, in which, for example, a public official bargains jobs for votes. Transforming leadership, in contrast, has a moral dimension. It may be said to occur when ‘one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality’. The transforming leader is one who, though initially impelled by the quest for individual recognition, ultimately advances collective purpose by being attuned to the aspirations of his or her followers. Burns also distinguished between leaders and ‘power wielders’ (Burns, 1978: 3–4). Leaders in some way satisfy the motives of their followers, whereas power-wielders are intent only on achieving their own purposes, whether or not these are shared by the people over whom they exert their power. Ever since these classic distinctions were made in the late 1970s, the gap between the increasing number of ‘leadership guidebooks’ and the relative lack of academic works in political science has been widening. This is all the more striking since the rise of executive power all over the world – including Western democracies – has been one of the most visible trends of the past decades. In Western Europe and in North America, the stability and strengthening of the executive branch has been the most striking feature of political development ever since the end of World War II. In the US, the ‘imperial presidency’ classically described by Arthur Schlesinger in his 1974 book is still very much the order of the day. G.W. Bush expanded executive powers so much that his two terms have been described as a revenge against Watergate and the subsequent weakening of the presidency (Schlesinger 1974, 2004; Rudalevige, 2009). Even though Obama’s presidency currently illustrates the limits of executive powers in a context of divided government, Obama has nonetheless pursued the same goals as Bush. In Western Europe, most parliamentary democracies have succeeded in gaining the stability that they lacked prior to the war (Bale, 2013; Colomer, 2008). In 1958, France finally created a powerful and stable executive with a largely subordinated parliament as the price to pay. In Great Britain, despite the constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty, parliament is in no position to bring about the resignation of the government, thus making the Prime Minister the dominant force in British politics. As for the German chancellor, the 1949 Fundamental Law (Grundgesetz) pioneered a ‘rationalization’ of parliament that Germans have been living with ever since. Among the major European democracies, Italy is maybe the only exception here, even though prime ministers seem to have been gaining increasing powers since the early 1990s. In other words, the institutional trend toward executive-centered systems is somewhat similar among Western democracies. The emphasis on executives and personal leadership is thus shared by democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Considering this transnational trend, how can the relative lack of systematic analysis of political leadership be explained? For one thing, leadership is a black box that harks back to a traditional problem in social sciences: human agency. Unlike the ‘hard’ sciences, political science deals with conscious and reflective subjects, capable of acting differently under the same stimuli (Hay, 2002: 50). Agency thus injects an inherent indeterminacy and contingency that leadership embodies. Leaders are indeed actors that can refashion the context in which they find themselves, thus making it impossible to identify regularities that could satisfy political scientists. Alongside the opposition between agency and structure – or conduct and context – lies a lingering suspicion by many in the profession that was best captured by Jean Blondel: ‘One reason why political leadership has not been systematically analyzed is the fear which it has provoked among generations of liberal thinkers. Alongside a few “good” leaders, so many have been ruthless in controlling their subjects and in acquiring territories, usually by force, that enthusiasm for leadership has been limited, to say the least. (…) The deeds of many 20th century leaders, both before and after the Second World War, did not help to modify the pessimistic view. Hence the widespread belief that leadership was essentially bad – a belief shared by many among the political elites of democratic countries, especially of those countries, on the Continent of Europe and in Latin America, where the population suffered particularly from the excesses of rulers’ (Blondel in Foley, 2013: 17). Finally, the domination of so-called ‘scientific’ approaches in political science – from behaviorism in the 1950s to rational choice nowadays – has led many in the profession to look down on issues like leadership that smacked of ‘old political science’. Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841 that ‘the history of the world (…) was the biography of great men’. James McGregor Burns also noted that traditional conceptions of leadership tend to be ‘dominated by images of presidents and prime ministers speaking to the masses from on high’ (Burns, 1978: 442). This classical conception paves the way for leadership studies that are merely a series of monographs or political biographies which say nothing about the regularities of political life and are based on the simplistic assumption that leadership is a top-down phenomenon. As a consequence, Michael Foley is perfectly right when he notes that ‘leaders were considered to be too variable; leadership was regarded as excessively concerned with the lure of agency over structure; its study was necessarily interpretative, variable, and unreliable in nature; and its corollary of followers smacked of properties that could not be construed as strictly rational’ (Foley, 2013: 17).

This brief overview of the state of the debate is indicative of what has been called a ‘tragedy’ for political science (Ricci, 1984): by focusing on narrow attempts to understand politics ‘scientifically’, the discipline has lost sight of the ‘big picture’ and is unable – or maybe even unwilling – to tackle broader issues. Leadership being one of them, political scientists must tread carefully when approaching it. Classical views of leadership have been widely reduced, in terms of their influence, by social and cultural history as well as by other social sciences. Since Burns, it has become commonplace to say that leadership actually has very little to do with crude power and brutal domination. Leaders, in Burns’ definition, induce followers to act in accord with the values and the motivations of both leaders and followers. It is a dynamic relationship that, at its best, finds leaders engaged in a process of raising the consciousness of followers, or at least engages both leaders and followers in a common enterprise. Leadership is meaningless without its democratic link with common purposes and collective needs.

According to this still-dominant definition, leadership is widely understood simply as a principal–agent theory: political leaders are ‘agents’ to whom authority is delegated in order to oversee tasks that advance the goals of their followers or ‘principals’. Franklin Roosevelt supposedly said in 1931 that ‘leadership can be successful only through the greatest amount of party harmony’ (Roosevelt, 1947: 244). This perspective has been especially influential in studies of legislative leadership. But this view largely fails to account for many characteristics of political leadership, which is individually based and events-driven.

To fully grasp political leadership, a heavy dose of contextual analysis is always required as well as a detailed account of how an individual fits into this wider framework and succeeds in altering the balance (s)he inherited. Thus, neo-institutionalism, especially in its historical form, provides a suitable scientific framework here, acknowledging as it does the pervasive influence of institutions on leadership through rules, norms and other frameworks. Leaders are thus partly ‘agents’ in so far as they are deeply embedded in their cultural, social and political environments. In his 1993 book, Stephen Skowronek provided a classical framework for understanding presidential leadership in the US when he differentiated between articulation (presidents expanding the institutional and political arrangements they inherited), repudiation (presidents breaking with past legacies) and disjunction (presidents caught up in past legacies and unable to adjust). Such an insight, that emphasizes structures and timing over agency, used by Fred Greenstein in his analysis of presidential leadership (Greenstein, 2009 a & b), could be expanded to other types of leaders. The view presenting leaders as agents of their followers fits only one of Skowronek’s categories, namely ‘articulation’. History is indeed littered with examples of ‘leaders’ who were not merely expressing the views of their supporters, but were also ‘builders’ or ‘architects’ of something new: from de Gaulle in 1940 to Tony Blair in 1994 and Barack Obama nowadays, many political leaders have largely been active of efficient causes, forces effecting or facilitating a certain result. Leaders at times act independently of their followers, tending toward important institutional innovations, new political departures or in some cases both. ‘Repudiation’ thus appears to be leadership in its most advanced and positive form. If ‘repudiation’ is the main criterion for a successful leadership, then ‘disjunction’ would seem to imply a failed leadership.

Our aim in this book is indeed to offer a more thorough understanding of leadership by detecting when leaders act as causal agents (or ‘actors’) rather than as agents of their followers. Our concern will be about the major threat, posed by the fracturing of the relationship between leaders and followers, which leaders need to keep in mind when building up their leadership. There is no denying that political leaders will usually be more assertive and active regarding political situations in which followers are already in agreement with what they want. In such cases, however, the leader him/herself as such does not matter: what the followers want is much more important than who the leader is. Yet, in uncertain situations, causal leadership is seen as the most effective solution. This notion of uncertainty has spawned a substantial number of studies concerning theories of risk or uncertainty management. In the field of politics, most of these studies have been concerned with theorizing or providing quantitative models to limit risks and control uncertainty (see among others: Cioffi-Revilla, 1998; Schedler, 2013). We posit that this notion of uncertainty in politics can be understood in the following ways: when the political, economic and geopolitical contexts are impossible to decipher (contextual uncertainty) and when division and confusion among followers blur the messages sent to the leaders (social uncertainty). The view we articulate through case studies in this book may eventually emphasize uncertain configurations in which leaders themselves mattered as game-changers. Drawing on neo-institutionalism, we suggest that leaders can also be influential in political situations in which followers are uncertain or divided about what they want. Taking this approach, one could go on to argue that the complex yet solid environments in which leaders are embedded weigh more heavily on them than their unstable and uncertain followers, whether it be political institutions as such, or pressures exercised by media or party structures. Taking the lead under these conditions, however, involves great political risks. Leaders should thus be defined first and foremost as risk-takers. Next, division and uncertainty among followers become a condition providing potential leaders with opportunities to shape the views of their supporters at a certain moment when they know what they reject without organizing their views into a positive and coherent whole. This is when a leader’s role becomes decisive.

This broad characterization says nothing, however, about the sequence of events and the reasons why some leaders actually cross the red line.² Of course, the diversity of contexts makes it impossible to identify a common thread running through cultures and centuries. It is, however, within the reach of social sciences to identify a configuration shared by most successful leaders. To single out the main characteristics of this configuration, we can pose four preliminary questions:

What makes a leader possible? Leadership matters most when past legacies are deemed insufficient to face new challenges and when the potential followership is still unsure of what the solutions could be. This is when the window of opportunity for a tentative leader is at its maximum. The general context makes ‘efficient’ leadership possible, meaning leadership as causal and independent agent.

What does a leader bring? A leader is not just a risk-taker in a context of division and uncertainty. (S)he is also a provider of stability. ‘Repudiation’ does not stand alone; it also implies an ability to formulate new and accepted common values for society. A leader is able to devise a new vision for his/her country, which explains why many have been decried by their opponents as being responsible for debasing the traditional order. Such accusations have always been sparked off by successful leaders, from Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt and Barack Obama as being somehow ‘un-American’ to George Washington or Charles de Gaulle as somehow ‘terminating the Republic’.

What is a leader? Leading on from what we have just said, (s)he is both an innovator and a builder. But a leader is also a communicator. The link between followership and leadership is the core of this political dynamic in which one person raises the awareness of a section of public opinion and conveys a series of values and objectives that become part of the national consensus.

What causes a leader to fail? The first three questions point to what makes a successful leader. But how is failure to be accounted for? Together with the absence of a lasting legacy, a failed leader is first and foremost an isolated leader. Not only does leadership imply communication, but it also requires a certain empathy with civil society and public opinion. Unlike a dictator, whose personal power paradoxically cuts him off from the people, a leader is essentially a link between society and wider moral values.

Following on from these questions, we contend that a potential leader will rely differently on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Is Senatorial Leadership even possible? The Deadlock of the American Upper Chamber
• 3 The Office Holder: John Boehner as Speaker of the US House of Representatives
• 4 Tony Blair’s Leadership Style in Foreign Policy: Hubris Without Constraints?
• 5 From Dewar to Salmond: The Scottish First Ministers and the Establishment of their Leadership
• 6 Political Leadership and the Instrumentalization of the Media: General de Gaulle between Politics and the Military (1958–1962)
• 7 Silvio’s Party
• 8 Leader of my Heart! Use of Twitter by Leaders’ Partners during Election Campaigns
• 9 Leadership and the European Debate from Margaret Thatcher to John Major
• 10 The Temptation of Populism in David Cameron’s Leadership Style
• 11 Leadership Elections and Democracy in the British Labour Party
• 12 The (Seeming) Power of (Seemingly) Leaderless Organizations: The Tea Party Movement as a Case Study
• 13 Petra Kelly: Charismatic Leadership in the German Peace Movement and Early Green Party
• 14 Erika Steinbach: The Last Charismatic Representative of the Expellees?
• 15 Edward Heath: The Failed Leadership of an Uninspiring Leader
• 16 When the President is not really the Boss: The Mysterious Case of Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Leadership
• 17 Conclusion
• Index