Prime Ministers and the Performance of Public Leadership

Strangio, Paul; Hart, Paul ‘t; Walter, James

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199666423.003.0001

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…Switching perennially between the front stage and the back stage of politics, and between the community gathering and the international summit, they convene, mediate, broker, persuade, bargain and cajole for a living. (Strangio et al, 2013: 1–2)…”

Section: The Importance Of Pms and Pm Leadership Styles In Security Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prime minister leadership style and the role of parliament in security policy

Kaarbo

2018

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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This article explores how differences in prime ministers’ leadership styles may affect parliamentary influence in security policy. Drawing on work on personality differences in political psychology, I argue leadership style is a critical but often overlooked factor in the growing area of research on parliaments and foreign affairs. My key argument is that prime ministers vary in how they respond to and manage parliamentary involvement in security policymaking. I propose Leadership Trait Analysis to capture prime ministers’ orientations towards parliamentary involvement. I examine the plausibility of my argument with intra-country comparisons of Turkish and UK prime ministers’ orientations towards parliament in specific cases of security policy. More generally, this article challenges more formal-institutional approaches to parliaments’ role in security policy. A focus on prime ministers has an analytic advantage of bringing together some of the various factors (such as intraparty divisions and public opinion) to explain parliamentary influence in security policy.

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Section: The Importance Of Pms and Pm Leadership Styles In Security Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prime minister leadership style and the role of parliament in security policy

Kaarbo

2018

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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“…However, in the end only more sophisticated surveys specifically seeking to capture different dimensions of performance can provide a reasonable basis for comparative performance-related assessments of different incumbents. Therefore, the assessments below draw on a series of expert surveys on rating and ranking prime ministers, in particular those reported in the empirically rich case studies gathered by Paul Strangio et al (2013) and several more recent sources. They include a wealth of different dimensions, from personality-related features (such as trustworthiness) and political dimensions of a candidate’s performance (such as party and coalition management) through concrete policy achievements 5 .…”

Section: Heir Apparent Prime Ministers and Leadership Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…3Of course, in political reality the fates of heirs and usurpers may be similar, as a closer inspection of Australian prime ministers through 2010 (see Strangio 2013) and the perceived performance of several more recent usurpers (Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Malcom Turnbull) would appear to suggest. Moreover, there are admittedly borderline cases.…”

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confidence: 99%

Heir Apparent Prime Ministers in Westminster Democracies: Promise and Performance

Helms

2018

Gov. & oppos.

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While the grand narratives of political leaders and leadership in parliamentary democracies tend to centre on victorious campaigners, prime ministers ‘inheriting’ the office from their predecessor between two parliamentary elections are a widespread occurrence in constitutional practice. Focusing on four Westminster democracies (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), this article inquires how such heirs apparent have fared in terms of prime ministerial performance. Although in light of their experience, expertise and public recognition, heir apparent prime ministers can be, and have been, considered to be particularly well placed to succeed, when eventually securing the most powerful political office, most of them have actually been conspicuous under-performers. The single most important and strongly counter-intuitive finding of an empirical investigation of different prime ministers is that extensive experience in government, both in terms of duration and diversity of ministerial offices held, seems to correlate more with failed rather than particularly successful premierships.

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“…Strictly speaking, securing a long tenure provides the opportunity for an extended leadership performance rather than representing a leadership skill in its own right. There is evidence from the major Westminster democracies (Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) which suggests there is indeed a very notable correlation between tenure in office and prime ministerial rankings, though longevity alone is not a guarantee of high ranking (see Strangio et al , 2013: Part III). Also, leaders do not become ever more powerful the longer their tenure lasts; their final term is rarely, if ever, considered to mark their most successful one in terms of leadership performance and public policy achievements (see for the UK, Theakston, 2013: 235).…”

Section: The Leadership Capital Of Helmut Kohlmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of leadership capital in compound democracies: inferences from the German case

Helms

2015

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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This article offers a contextualization of the recently introduced leadership capital concept within the wider field of political leadership research, and a demonstration of its usefulness for studying leadership performances and patterns in different institutional and political contexts. At the centre of this piece, is an application of the leadership capital approach to studying the conditions and manifestations of executive leadership in the Federal Republic of Germany, which is being considered a classic case of a compound democracy. As the inquiry into the German case suggests, the politics of leadership capital is in fact strongly shaped by the institutional framework of a regime. That said, institutions do not determine the accumulation and spending of leadership capital, and after all, even within a given institutional context, different leaders lead by making different choices. As a case study on Helmut Kohl, the Federal Republic’s longest serving chancellor, demonstrates, the leadership capital approach marks a useful and meaningful conceptual device for a deeper analytical understanding of a leader’s performance. An inquiry carried out along these lines suggests in particular that informality was one of Kohl’s key strengths across all three dimensions of leadership capital (skills, relations, and reputation), which effectively ‘freed’ him to some considerable extent from the supposedly vital ‘performative’ parts of the office of chief executive.

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Prime Ministers and the Performance of Public Leadership

Cited by 16 publications

References 39 publications

Prime minister leadership style and the role of parliament in security policy

Prime minister leadership style and the role of parliament in security policy

Heir Apparent Prime Ministers in Westminster Democracies: Promise and Performance

The politics of leadership capital in compound democracies: inferences from the German case

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