Leadership theories and the academic literature can sometimes seem difficult for practitioners to understand because of complex conceptualizations, obscure terms y and its enormousness. Yet taken as ...a whole, the literature makes a great deal of sense and has much to offer. Indeed, the truths are often quite simple, elegant, and straightforward. The purpose of this article is to review the major findings of the organizational leadership literature and to identify the important overarching insights, specifically those of particuUr importance to todays leaders in administrative positions in the public sector, where an evolving context constantly reconfigures age-old challenges.
It is well understood that trust in government responds to the performance of the president, Congress, and the economy. Despite improved government performance, however, trust has never returned to ...the levels witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. Social capital may be the force that has kept trust low. If so, we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level. Using macrolevel data, the analysis, here, is designed to capture the variation over time in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust. The empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter, but that social capital appears to be the force which accounts for the decline in trust over the last 40 years.
Sovereign wealth funds have emerged as major investors in corporate and real resources worldwide. After an overview of their magnitude, we consider the institutional arrangements under which many of ...the sovereign wealth funds operate. We focus on a specific set of agency problems that is of first-order importance for these funds: that is, the direct involvement of political leaders in the management process. We show that sovereign wealth funds with greater involvement of political leaders in fund management are associated with investment strategies that seem to favor short-term economic policy goals in their respective countries at the expense of longer-term maximization of returns. Sovereign wealth funds face several other issues, like how best to cope with demands for transparency, which can allow others to copy their investment strategies, and how to address the problems that arise with sheer size, like the difficulties of scaling up investment strategies that only work with a smaller value of assets under investment. In the conclusion, we discuss how various approaches cultivated by effective institutional investors worldwide--from investing in the best people to pioneering new asset classes to compartmentalizing investment activities--may provide clues as to how sovereign wealth funds might address these issues. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Much of the literature on electoral politics in Africa has focused on one mechanism of electoral mobilization: reliance on shared ethnic identity between politicians and voters. On the contrary, the ...author argues that politicians pursue two distinct modes of nonprogrammatic electoral mobilization: (1) by directly relying on the support of voters from one's own ethnic background, and (2) by indirectly working through electoral intermediaries—local leaders who command moral authority, control resources, and can influence the electoral behavior of their dependents. Yet the power of local leaders varies greatly; hence the option to use electoral intermediaries is not available in all settings. The choice of electoral mobilization affects national electoral outcomes: by severing the direct link between politicians and voters, intermediaries reduce a campaign's reliance on shared identity and create cross-ethnic electorates. The evidence for this argument is based on original interviews with political leaders collected during fieldwork in Senegal and Benin during the 2006–7 electoral season, media coverage of elections, and a historical analysis of first mass elections in the 1950s.
Dieses open access Buch enthält als erste politikwissenschaftliche Publikation Daten zu ehrenamtlichen Bürgermeistern für alle 10 Bundesländer, in denen diese eine wichtige Position der politischen ...Repräsentation in ländlichen Räumen einnehmen. Etwa 60% aller Kommunen in Deutschland werden von ehrenamtlichen Bürgermeistern verwaltet, deren regionale Bedeutung sich je nach Bundesland aber stark unterscheidet. Das Buch leitet mit der Beschreibung des jeweiligen rechtlichen Rahmens der Kommunalverfassungen der Bundesländer, der regionalen Verteilung und der Analyse von Wahldaten in das Thema der ehrenamtlichen Bürgermeister ein, bevor die Ergebnisse eines breit angelegten repräsentativen Umfrageprojektes präsentiert werden. Mit diesen verschiedenen Forschungsansätzen leistet das Buch einen Beitrag zur Forschungsliteratur sowohl der lokalen Politikforschung zu Bürgermeistern als auch zum Ehrenamt in ländlichen Räumen. Erstmalig können in diesem Ausmaß Daten über die Sozialstruktur, Aufgaben, Motivation, Amtsausführung, Beziehung zu Partei oder Wählergemeinschaft, Vereinbarkeit von Beruf, Familie und Ehrenamt, Anfeindungen sowie potenziellem Nachwuchs im Ehrenamt als Bürgermeister präsentiert werden. Trotz unterschiedlicher rechtlicher Rahmensetzungen der Bundesländer zeigen sich ähnliche Probleme und Herausforderungen für deren Lösung.
Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism; both backed by the authority of the state and argues that ...contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It studies stories told through film, journalism, and popular non-fiction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture.
Moving between mediascapes to create an archive of popular culture, Murty advances our understanding of political economy through material that is often seen as inconsequential, namely the popular cultural story. These stories stoke our desires (e.g. for wealth), scaffold our instincts (e.g. for a strong leadership) and shape our values.
Abstract
This study aims to show how different political leaders ideologically position themselves in the discourse of ‘problem frame’ in their first national response to the coronavirus disease 2019 ...(COVID-19) pandemic. To analyse the ideological nature of the ‘problem frame’, 17 leaders’ national lockdown speeches from different countries were collected and analysed within the theoretical framework of critical metaphor studies and frame semantics. Procedurally, metaphors in the collected speeches were identified by applying Pragglejaz Group’s MIP (2007) and MIPVU (2010), and coded into thematic categories via NVivo 12.0. Overall, 19 thematic codes (1,045 metaphorical expressions) were established, and their content analysis demonstrated specific differences in gender performance of a national health policy during the pandemic. It has been clarified that crisis political discourse is not that much affected by gender double bind, and female speakers openly display their femininity by focusing a lot on sensitivity and nurturance. By contrast, male speakers overwhelmingly follow a standardised competitive frame with emotional moments aimed at a more aggressive response to the pandemic and focusing on populist sentiment.
This study analyzes how political leaders’ material backgrounds affect redistributive policies in democracies. Building on political socialization theory, we argue that politicians with personal ...experience of economic hardship are more likely to have sympathetic attitudes toward redistribution than those without such experience, particularly where political constraints are weak. We posit that firsthand knowledge of economic hardship helps political leaders understand why the poor need government redistribution, and leads them to support more generous social welfare policies. Analyzing an original dataset of leaders’ material background in 74 democratic countries between 1980 and 2011, we find that leaders who experienced economic hardship in their youth increase social welfare spending during their tenure, particularly when political constraints are weak. Following prior studies on leaders’ personal experiences and policy outcomes, this study provides a new approach to redistribution and welfare policy.
International human rights treaties are argued to increase both the likelihood of domestic mobilized dissent and judicial constraint. These pressures pull leaders in conflicting directions: mobilized ...challenges undermine a leader’s position in power, increasing incentives to repress; courts raise the probability of litigation, decreasing incentives to repress. We argue authorities balance these pressures based on their job security. Politically insecure leaders, desperate to retain power, repress to control the destabilizing effects of dissent. Secure leaders are less likely to fall to citizen pressures, but the probability of facing an effective judiciary weighs heavily in their expected costs. Consequently, they repress less to avoid litigation. We find empirical support for the implications of our formal theory using data on commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture. Treaties have no effect on repression in states with insecure leaders but have a positive effect on rights protection in states headed by secure leaders.
Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with ...information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies the effective leaders of each independent state; it codes when and how leaders came into power, their age, and their gender, as well as their personal fate one year after they lost office. We illustrate the utility of the Archigos dataset by demonstrating how leader attributes predict other features of interest in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Crisis interactions differ depending on whether leaders face each other for the first time or have had prior interactions. Irregular leader changes can help identify political change in autocracies not apparent from data that consider only the democratic nature of institutions. Finally, transitions to democracy in the third wave are more likely to fail in instances where autocratic rulers were punished after leaving office. Our examples illustrate new empirical findings that simply could not be explored in existing data sources. Although selective, our overview demonstrates how Archigos bears considerable promise in providing answers to new and old research questions and opens up new avenues for research on individual leaders as decisionmakers.
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