What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader's influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders, they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing.

Using data from the United Kingdom, we estimate the effects of ministerial resignation on government popularity. We test a counterfactual argument that resignations should have a corrective effect, that is, there is an increase in popularity following a resignation when taking into account the negative effect on popularity of the resignation issue. We get empirical estimates by using the age of ministers involved in resignation issues as an instrument. Our IV estimates provide empirical support for the corrective effect.

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual's ability to assess the mood is his sense of direction. These factors combine to form an index of both the desirability and the feasibility of leadership: we call this index Michels' Ratio. A sovereign party conference gives way to leadership by an individual or oligarchy if and only if Michels' Ratio is sufficiently high. Leadership enhances the clarity of intra-party communication, but weakens the response of policy choices to the party's mood.© The authors. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source 2 In her recent Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association, Margaret Levi (2006) called for a new theory of government. A central ingredient in her proposed recipe was leadership; she argued (p. 13) that "human agency, through leadership, belief reformation, preference formation, and widespread constituent support, provides the yeast, the missing ingredient of a dynamic theory of effective government." Few would deny that leadership is an essential feature of political organization, and yet (Levi, 2006, p. 11) "still lacking is a model of the origins and means of ensuring good leadership."We take a small step in response to Levi's call. Building on her suggestion that (p. 10) "leadership-both of government and within civil society-provides the agency that coordinates the efforts of others" we develop a formal model in which the direction provided by leadership helps to coordinate the actions of a mass. We ask: is such direction best provided by one, a few, or the many? These institutional forms correspond to de facto dictatorship, oligarchy, and pure democracy. While an answer to this first question reveals the relative desirability of these institutional forms, we must also consider their feasibility: when will members of a democratic body voluntarily follow the lead taken by either a single individual or an elite subset of their membership?The "Iron Law of Oligarchy" emerging from Michels' (1915) study of labor movements and political parties offers unequivocal answers to these two questions. Michels realized that success might require the effective coordination of an activist base, arguing that the "importance and influence of the working class are directly proportional to its numerical strength. But for the representation of that numerical strength organization and coordination are indispensable." (Michels, 1915, p. 19) This view stemmed from Michels' study of the German Socialist Party.2 Whilst nominally adhering to the principle of conference sovereignty, key decisions were taken within the party's fraktion meetings; conference rallied beh...

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in Britain from 1945 to 1997. We focus on three sets of attributes (i) personal characteristics of the minister; (ii) political characteristics of the minister; and (iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers' capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard rates than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a minister's capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample. We use different strategies to control for the characteristics of the government the minister serves in. Our results are robust to any of these controls.In the British political system, where policy making is the primary function of departments, rising to ministerial office represents the height of ambition for most backbenchers. Yet we know little about what determines which ministers are successful. James Alt begins his essay on continuity and turnover in the British cabinet with the words: 'It is perhaps more difficult to place this study in the context of the academic literature than to show that it covers a topic of some importance.' 1 Over a quarter of a century later, with the exception of the study by Alt, the literature on ministers in the British cabinet still lacks systematic analysis. Blondel's comment a decade later remains pertinent: the 'study of ministers and ministerial careers is in its infancy'. 2 Of course there is a large literature on the British cabinet. But the historical-cumdescriptive style has largely been concerned with relationships between the prime minister and cabinet colleagues, charting the ever advancing dominance of the premier. 3 Useful histories have described the differing styles

Cohesive government-vs-opposition voting is a robust empirical regularity in Westminster democracies. Using new data from the modern Scottish parliament we show that this pattern cannot be explained by similarity of preferences within or between the government and opposition ranks. We look at differences in the way that parties operate in Westminster and Holyrood and use roll call records show that the observed behavior is unlikely to be determined by preferences on any underlying issue dimension. Using a simple variant of the agenda-setting model-in which MPs can commit to their voting strategies-we show that the procedural rules for reaching collective decisions in Westminster systems can explain this phenomenon: in the equilibrium, on some bills, members of the opposition vote against the government irrespective of the proposal that is made. Such strategic opposition can reinforce government cohesiveness and have a moderating effect on policy outcomes. We introduce

Abstract. Empirical evidence suggests that a prime minister benefits from firing ministers who are involved in political scandals. We explore a model in which scandals are positively related to policy activism, so that a prime minister may wish to protect a minister from resignation calls. We find that protection can sometimes discourage activism: it enhances the value of a minister's career and hence encourages him to "sit tight" by moderating his activities. On the other hand, an exogenous increase in exposure to scandals may lead a minister to "live for today" by pursuing controversial policies. The prime minister's ability to protect ministers is limited by her short-term incentive to fire. She may, however, enhance her credibility by building a collective reputation with the cabinet; the heterogeneity of cabinet membership plays an important role.Acknowledgements. For helpful comments and suggestions we thank Keith Dowding, Valentino

We consider a government for which success requires high performance by talented ministers. A leader provides incentives to her ministers by firing those who fail. However, the consequent turnover drains a finite talent pool of potential appointees. The severity of the optimal firing rule and ministerial performances decline over time: the lifetime of an effective government is limited. We relate this lifetime to various factors, including external shocks, the replenishment of the talent pool, and the leader's reputation. Some results are surprising: an increase in the stability of government and the exogenous imposition of stricter performance standards can both shorten the era of effective government, and an increase in the replenishment of the talent pool can reduce incumbent ministers' performance.

The Editors and publishers apologize for the lack of distinction in Figures 2 and 3 printed on pages 255–6 of this volume of the Journal, and offer the following as replacements: