Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors. We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including ...George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Grandiose, but not vulnerable, narcissism was associated with superior overall greatness in an aggregate poll; it was also positively associated with public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and allied behaviors, and with several objective indicators of performance, such as winning the popular vote and initiating legislation. Nevertheless, grandiose narcissism was also associated with several negative outcomes, including congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behaviors. We found that presidents exhibit elevated levels of grandiose narcissism compared with the general population, and that presidents' grandiose narcissism has been rising over time. Our findings suggest that grandiose narcissism may be a double-edged sword in the leadership domain.
Women as Political Leaders Genovese, Michael A; Steckenrider, Janie S
2013, 20130902, 2013-09-02, 2013-04-17, 20130101
eBook
Over the past several years, the fields of Leadership Studies and of Women's Studies have grown tremendously. This book, which is a series of case studies of women who have headed governments across ...the globe, will discuss the conditions and situations under which women rose to power and give a brief biography of each woman. A special chapter on why no U.S. woman has risen to the top, and a review of the political campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Michele Bachmann and others will be included. This book will be of interest for courses in women and leadership, global politics and gender studies.
We develop a simple spatial model suggesting that Members of Parliament strive for the inclusion of the head of state’s party in coalitions formed in mixed democratic polities, and that parliamentary ...parties try to assemble coalitions that minimize the ideological distance to the head of state. We identify the German local level of government as functionally equivalent to a parliamentary setting, such that the directly elected mayor has competencies similar to a president in a mixed national polity. Our findings show that the party affiliation of the head of state is a key factor considered by party members in the legislature when forming coalitions: coalitions in the legislature are more likely to form if they include the party of the head of the executive branch. Furthermore, the policy preferences of the head of the executive branch matter for the legislators’ behavior in the coalition formation process: the smaller the ideological distance between the position of a coalition and the position of the head of state, the more likely a coalition is to be formed.
The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of alternating heads of state on structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Indeed, the alternation of a head of state is an ...institutional tool likely to promote the reallocation of labor, innovation and human capital and thus improve structural change and intra-industry productivity, which are the two components of structural transformation. The primary data collected on the alternation of heads of state, the Africa sector database (ASD) and the World Development Indicators (WDI) allow us to illustrate our remarks using the two steps least squares (2SLS) method on a panel of 17 SSA countries. The results obtained show that the number of alternations of heads of state positively and significantly affects intra-industry productivity and structural change in SSA.
Do Educated Leaders Matter? Besley, Timothy; Montalvo, Jose G.; Reynal-Querol, Marta
The Economic journal (London),
August 2011, Letnik:
121, Številka:
554
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article uses data on more than 1,000 political leaders between 1875 and 2004 to investigate whether having a more educated leader affects the rate of economic growth. We use an expanded set of ...random leadership transitions because of natural death or terminal illness to show, following an earlier paper by Jones and Olken (2005), that leaders matter for growth. We then provide evidence supporting the view that heterogeneity among leaders' educational attainment is important with growth being higher by having leaders who are more highly educated.
Stalin Kuromiya, Hiroaki
2013, c2005., 2005, 20130816, 2013-08-16, 20050101
eBook
This profile looks at how Stalin, despite being regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world, achievieving divine-like status ...as a dictator.
Through recently uncovered research material and Stalin's archives in Moscow, Kuromiya analyzes how and why Stalin was a rare, even unique, politician who literally lived by politics alone. He analyses how Stalin understood psychology campaigns well and how he used this understanding in his political reign and terror. Kuromiya provides a convincing, concise and up-to-date analysis of Stalin's political life.
Policy-makers and the electorate assume political executives' life experiences affect their policy choices once in office. Recent international relations work on leaders focuses almost entirely on ...how political institutions shape leaders' choices rather than on leaders' personal attributes and how they influence policy choices. This article focuses the analytic lens on leaders and their personal backgrounds. We theorize that the prior military background of a leader is an important life experience with direct relevance for how leaders evaluate the utility of using military force. We test several propositions employing a new data set, building on Archigos, that encompasses the life background characteristics of more than 2,500 heads of state from 1875 to 2004. The results show that the leaders most likely to initiate militarized disputes and wars are those with prior military service but no combat experience, as well as former rebels.
French left-wing literary theories have continued to accept and interpret Mao Zedong's thought (including his theories on literature and art) from the 1960s to today. This intellectual communication ...enabled the formation of Louis Althusser's structural Marxism and contemporary leftwing literary theory. Mao's theory of contradiction and his thoughts on reliance on the popular masses, aesthetics and politics, and people's literature and art are the major intellectual resources for Louis Althusser's, Alain Badiou's, and Slavoj Zizek's theories and are fully integrated into their theoretical system and critical practice. Althusser, Badiou, and Zizek innovated materialistic dialectics on the basis of Mao's theory of contradiction, within which, however, there are misreadings. Meanwhile, Jacques Ranciere integrates Mao's theory of the mass line and his political views on literature and art into his own theories of politics of disagreement, distribution of the sensible, and politics of literature. Nevertheless, the Maoism recognized by the French left should not be equated with Mao Zedong Thought in China, as misreadings arising from "the Wind from the East" are inevitable.
Although psychopathic personality (psychopathy) is marked largely by maladaptive traits (e.g., poor impulse control, lack of guilt), some authors have conjectured that some features of this condition ...(e.g., fearlessness, interpersonal dominance) are adaptive in certain occupations, including leadership positions. We tested this hypothesis in the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush using (a) psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential leadership, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Fearless Dominance, which reflects the boldness associated with psychopathy, was associated with better rated presidential performance, leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management, Congressional relations, and allied variables; it was also associated with several largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance, such as initiating new projects and being viewed as a world figure. Most of these associations survived statistical control for covariates, including intellectual brilliance, five factor model personality traits, and need for power. In contrast, Impulsive Antisociality and related traits of psychopathy were generally unassociated with rated presidential performance, although they were linked to some largely or entirely objective indicators of negative job performance, including Congressional impeachment resolutions, tolerating unethical behavior in subordinates, and negative character. These findings indicate that the boldness associated with psychopathy is an important but heretofore neglected predictor of presidential performance, and suggest that certain features of psychopathy are tied to successful interpersonal behavior.
Leader Succession and Civil War Kokkonen, Andrej; Sundell, Anders
Comparative political studies,
03/2020, Letnik:
53, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Leadership succession is a perennial source of instability in autocratic regimes. Despite this, it has remained a curiously understudied phenomenon in political science. In this article, we compile a ...novel and comprehensive dataset on civil war in Europe and combine it with data on the fate of monarchs in 28 states over 800 years to investigate how autocratic succession affected the risk of civil war. Exploiting the natural deaths of monarchs to identify exogenous variation in successions, we find that successions substantially increased the risk of civil war. The risk of succession wars could, however, be mitigated by hereditary succession arrangements (i.e., primogeniture—the principle of letting the oldest son inherit the throne). When hereditary monarchies replaced elective monarchies in Europe, succession wars declined drastically. Our results point to the importance of the succession, and the institutions governing it, for political stability in autocratic regimes.
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