Statecraft and the Assessment of National Political Leaders: The Case of New Labour and Tony Blair

Abstract

This article makes the case for employing the statecraft approach (associated with the late Jim Bulpitt) to assess political leadership in Britain. Rather than 'importing' methodologies from the US, as some scholars have done, statecraft is preferred in the UK context for two main reasons. First, statecraft is concerned with the motives and behaviour of leadership cliques, and as a result, it is more appropriate for the collective leadership style that is a characteristic of parliamentary systems such as that in Britain. Second, statecraft goes some way towards incorporating a sense of structural context into our evaluation of leadership performance. This need to take into account the broader institutional constraints facing chief executives is something that an increasing number of academics in this area have been calling for. The utility of the approach is illustrated through a case study of the Blair administration.

Evaluating British prime ministerial performance: David Cameron’s premiership in political time

“…Derived from GreensteinÕs (2001) assessments of US presidents, the leadership style/skills model focuses on prime ministerial performance in relation to: public communication; organisational capacity; political skills; policy vision; cognitive style (how they process advice and take decisions); and emotional intelligence (see Theakston, 2007;. In contrast, the statecraft model focuses on how British leaders secure office and power through party management, winning the battle of ideas, developing a successful electoral strategy, and demonstrating Ôgoverning competenceÕ (Bulpitt, 1986;Buller and James, 2012;Clarke et al, 2015).…”

“…The statecraft model goes further in incorporating several aspects of structural context into leadership evaluation (Buller and James, 2012), including electoral constraints, public attitudes towards policies, the international situation and the relationship between foreign and domestic policy, and pre-eminently economic factors. Buller and James (2015) have valuably strengthened the statecraft modelÕs engagement with this structural context.…”

Statecraft, scalecraft and local government reorganisation in Wales

“…First, whilst it is clear that a number of studies have considered the processes of statecraft and / or scalecraft in isolation or as distinct and separate (see Fraser, 2010;Buller and James, 2012, as well as the work of Bulpitt), little work to date has considered the ways in which they may be intimately connected. In this respect, the various statecraft functions that have been identified can all be linked to the rescaling of governance, as states seek to practice what they do partly through a scaling and rescaling of their activities.…”

“…In addition, Fraser (2010, p.335) has also defined statecraft as "the craft that states practice when they act politically". This highlights the motives and behaviours of states and governments and how politics and power -as well as broader structural issues -are important in shaping behaviour (Buller and James, 2012). …”

Assessing the Authority of Political Office-Holders: The Leadership Capital Index

“…A provisional overall interpretive assessment is given in Table 2 with illustrative examples leaders arguably fitting into the various categories. As with the 'natural rate of governability' some of the subjective measures are contextdependent (Buller and James 2012;Bulpitt 1986). What are considered assets (skills, achievements or victories) in one setting may not be in another setting.…”