This collection of essays seeks to explore the unique way democracy disperses leadership, and the significant opportunities and challenges it presents to democratic leaders.
Political leadership has returned to the forefront of research in political science in recent years, after several years of neglect. This Handbook provides a broad-ranging and cohesive examination of the study of political leadership.
Politicians everywhere tend to attract cynicism and inspire disillusionment. They are supposed to epitomize the promise of democratic government and yet invariably find themselves cast as the enemy of every virtue that system seeks to uphold. In the Pacific, "politician" has become a byword for corruption, graft, and misconduct. This was not always the case—the independence generation is still remembered as strong leaders—but today's leaders are commonly associated with malaise and despair. Once heroes of self-determination, politicians are now the targets of donor attempts to institute "good governance," while Fiji's 2006 coup was partly justified on the grounds that they needed "cleaning up." But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay, and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region's political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We learn that politics is a messy, unpredictable, and, at times, dirty business that nonetheless inspires service and sacrifice. We come to understand how being a politician has changed since independence and consider what this means for how we think about issues of corruption and misconduct. We find that politics is deeply embedded in the lives of individuals, families, and communities; an account that belies the common characterization of democracy in the Pacific as a "façade" or "foreign flower." Ultimately, this is a sympathetic counter-narrative to the populist critique. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human—neither saints nor sinners—is timely given the wave of cynicism and disaffection. As such, this book is a must read for all those who believe in the promise of representative government.
How can we strengthen the capacity of governments and parties to manage arrivals and departures at the top? Democracy requires reliable processes for the transfer of power from one generation of leaders to the next. This book introduces new analytical frameworks and presents the latest empirical evidence from comparative political research.
A Dangerous Passion argues that leadership and honor are mutually constitutive and that this dynamic relationship fundamentally shapes the character of political practice. Haig Patapan shows how our contemporary blindness to this leadership-honor dynamic and neglect of the significance of honor (and shame) in modern politics have caused us to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of leadership. We have lost sight of how honor shapes the ambitions and aspirations of those who seek political office, and the opportunities and limits it imposes on leaders when engaging with their followers. What has been obscured are the two faces of honor: how it is the dangerous passion that fuels the ambitions of the glory seekers to pursue tyranny and empire, as well as being the source of good leadership that is founded on noble ambition and sacrifice for the common good. Patapan examines classical magnanimity, Machiavellian glory, and Hobbesian-dispersed leadership, views that continue to be debated, and then offers insights from these debates to illuminate a series of contemporary political challenges for leaders, including the politics of fame, identity, and nationalism.
Building on recent theories of interactive governance and political leadership, Interactive Political Leadership develops a concept of interactive political leadership and a theoretical framework for studying the role of elected politicians in the age of governance. The purpose of the theoretical framework is to inspire and guide empirical research into how elected politicians perform political leadership in a society where citizens and other stakeholders play an active role in making and implementing political decisions and what barriers, challenges, and dilemmas they encounter in relation to the performance of interactive political leadership. The research framework draws extensively on recent theories of interactive governance and political leadership and other new developments in political science and public administration research. Moreover, it finds inspiration in current tendencies and embryonic examples of interactive political leadership performed by elected politicians operating at different levels of governance in Western liberal democracies. The basic assumption is that political legitimacy is essential for the survival of a political system, and that interactive political leadership stands out as a promising way of securing what political scientists denote as input-, throughput-, output-, and outcome legitimacy in the age of governance. Hence, interactive political leadership aims to establish a bridge between representative democracy and emergent forms of political participation, to promote political learning and accountability, to strengthen the political entrepreneurship of elected politicians, and to advance the political system's implementation capacity through resource mobilization. The book develops 20 propositions that sets the agenda for a new and much needed field of empirical research into political leadership in the age of governance.
The Research Handbook on Visual Politics focuses on key theories and methodologies for better understanding visual political communication. It also concentrates on the depictions of power within politics, taking a historical and longitudinal approach to the topic of placing visuals within a wider framework of political understanding.
Providing an authoritative global overview of theoretical and empirical research in the field, this Handbook explores the complex relationship between gender and corruption in democracies. Through an analysis of the gendered dynamics of corruption across institutions, it advances understanding of both its causes and consequences.
Inside the Local Campaign reveals what goes on in constituency campaigns during a Canadian election. For decades, the media has focused primarily on the national campaign and party leaders, and the practice of canvassing for votes by candidates and their supporters has been seen as more tradition than science. But things have evolved with digital media. Local-level campaigning is more fashionable – and critical for gathering data that can be used post-election. Using the 2021 federal campaign as an anchor, an impressive collection of authors and practitioners discusses local-level campaigning in electoral districts across the country, highlights local trends and on-the-ground roles, and discloses hidden details about how local campaigns are run.
Once seen as a fringe phenomenon, populism is back. While some politicians and media outlets present it as dangerous to the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, others hail it as the fix for broken democracies. Not surprisingly, questions about populism abound. Does it really threaten democracy? Why the sudden rise in populism? And what are we talking about when we talk about "populism"? The Global Rise of Populism argues for the need to rethink this concept. While still based on the classic divide between "the people" and "the elite," populism's reliance on new media technologies, its shifting relationship to political representation, and its increasing ubiquity have seen it transform in nuanced ways that demand explaining. Benjamin Moffitt contends that populism is not one entity, but a political style that is performed, embodied, and enacted across different political and cultural contexts. This new understanding makes sense of populism in a time when media pervades political life, a sense of crisis prevails, and populism has gone truly global.