Life of Brian Revisited: Assessing Informational and Non-Informational Leadership Tools

Abstract

Recent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders’ rhetorical signals facilitate followers’ co-ordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article empirically demonstrates that followers react to informational signals from leaders. It further theorizes that leaders use a combination of informational and non-informational tools to solve the co-ordination problem. The findings show that a mixture of informational and non-informational tools shapes followers’ strategic calculi. Ignoring non-informational tools—and particularly the interrelationship between informational and non-informational tools—can threaten the internal validity of causal inference in the analysis of leadership effects on co-ordination.

Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics

“…Stewart and Zhukov (2009) use public statements by Russian leaders to understand how military versus political elites influence Russia's decision to intervene in neighboring countries. Baturo and Mikhaylov (2013) Eggers and Spirling (2011) use parliamentary debates to model exchanges among politicians in the British House of Commons. Miller (2013) analyzes speeches in the United Nations to show that speeches by delegations from countries that were previously colonized devote more words to themes of victimization than states that were never colonized.…”

Cursus Honorum: Personal Background, Careers and Experience of Political Leaders in Democracy and Dictatorship—New Data and Analyses

“…The first hurdle in examining leaders' effects therefore is to distinguish between leaders' own effects and those of the offices they occupy (Baturo & Elkink, 2014). Leaders' commands and policy preferences have also to be transmitted to, and implemented by their followers (Baturo & Mikhaylov, 2013). Scholars must equally account for context, as crises and other events may dictate what leaders respond to, while customary practices dictate whether or not leaders should intervene at all (Blondel, 1987, p. 7).…”

Database of parliamentary speeches in Ireland, 1919–2013

“…In supervised learning models like Wordscore, this problem has typically been dealt with by estimating text models separately for each time period (e.g. Baturo and Mikhaylov, 2013;Herzog and Benoit, 2015), in Wordfish estimation should be a cautionary note for using the approach with time series data, even though the original method was specifically designed to deal with time-series data as indicated in the title of the paper (Slapin and Proksch, 2008).…”