How Adenauer Lost Power: Understanding Leadership Rivalry and Succession Conflict in Political Parties

Abstract

However good and powerful they may be, all leaders have a limited 'sell-by' date. Political power can never be monopolised indefinitely or unconditionally. However steep the summit of the political hierarchy may be, a leader must maintain sufficient support among the crucial power centres in the society he is governing. Any political leader serves at the mercy of powerful interest groups: his extended family, his ethnic clan, business leaders, the military, party elders, ideological or regional factions within the party, and so on. When these power centres lose faith in a leader, envy him his success, or sense that his once iron fist is weakening, sooner or later his position will be on the line. In theory, democracies provide intelligent institutional rules for periodic leader succession, yet, as Michels and later theorists imply, 1 in practice many successions are not the product of election results. Moreover, many leadership successions do not unfold

Accruing career capital: How party leaders with more political experience survive longer

“…Second, the party leader survival literature focuses on ’the factors that determine the political and professional fates of individuals’ and their life expectancy’ (Hart and Uhr 2011, 13) and consists of two traditions, first the more in-depth case studies on leadership transitions and successions (Jackson 1975; Bille 1997, t Hart 2007; Bynander and Hart 2008; Mazzoleni and Rossini 2016), and second, the studies that explicitly include hazard models (see Table 1). 1 Importantly, four different factors that influence survival warrant consideration: institutional (Cross and Blais 2012b), situational (Andrews and Jackman 2008; Ennser-Jedenastik and Schumacher 2015, 2021), perceptual (Horiuchi et al, 2015; So 2018; Alexiadou and O’Malley 2022) and individual factors (O’Brien 2015; O’Neill et al, 2021).…”

Understanding Political Leadership

“…The study of political leadership is currently experiencing a renaissance. It has been energized by a flurry of monographs, collaborative volumes, and anthologies (e.g., Kane et al 2009;Masciulli et al 2009;Blondel and Thiebault 2010;Aarts et al 2011;Bennister 2012;Helms 2012a;Cross and Blais 2012;'t Hart and Uhr 2011;Kane andPatapan 2012, 2014;Foley, 2013a;Strangio et al 2013;Brown 2014;Rhodes and 't Hart 2014;'t Hart 2014a;Cross and Pilet 2015;Dowding and Dumont 2015;Elgie 2015;Storey et al 2016). In the new wave of studies-which also feature important contributions from sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, communication scholars, and linguists (Rhodes and 't Hart PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com).…”

“…We experiment with the uses to which this novel tool-we first conceived of it in 2013 and published about it in 2014/5 ('t Hart 2014a;Bennister et al 2015)-can be put. We seek to demonstrate how it can inform the comparative study of political leadership by: a.…”

“…We believe it has the potential to stimulate and systematize a much-needed strand of comparative research on political leadership that taps into relational rather than competency-based notions of leadership, relates behavioral to perceptual approaches, and can help us examine the effects of variations in the institutional and situational contexts that leaders face. Although still in the early stages of its development following its launch by 't Hart (2014a) and Bennister et al (2015), the LCI has already generated further empirical work (see Helms 2016;Burrett 2016). This volume presents a series of LCI applications across a range of leaders and political systems, allowing us to assess its merits and limitations, and develop pathways for its further development.…”

Leadership succession in politics: The democracy/autocracy divide revisited

“…Much work in the field has focused on how power changes hands in democratic regimes (see, for example, Bynander and ‘t Hart, 2006, 2008; Helms, 2018; Horiuchi et al, 2016; ‘t Hart, 2007; ‘t Hart and Uhr, 2011b; Worthy, 2016). More recently, this work has come to be complemented by valuable comparative assessments of successions in democratic politics and business (see, for example, Bynander and ‘t Hart, 2017; Farah et al, 2019).…”