Leadership: What It Means, What It Does, and What We Want to Know About It

Abstract

Leaders are part of virtually all organized political life. There have been important recent advances in modeling "leaders" as well as clever and innovative empirical studies. We review recent contributions from the political science, economics, and management literatures. We discuss the extent to which these new works represent advances over the major classic works on leadership and organization from the twentieth century. We identify important gaps, chief among them (a) theorizing a role for coercion, (b) modeling the endogenous emergence of leaders, and (c) empirically disentangling the effect of an individual leader from her office, especially when leaders emerge endogenously.

The significance of political leaders for social policy expansion in Brazil, China, India and South Africa

“…Although the study of leaders and leadership has declined in political science (but see Ahlquist & Levi, 2011;Jervis, 2013), there is a stronger tradition of examining the role of political leaders in foreign policy and international relations than in social policy. In international relations, work soon evolved from a focus on how leaders' backgrounds, social origins, education and training might shed light on their actions to a focus on their orientations, beliefs and values (see George, 1969;Holsti & Rosenau, 1998) or on their personalities and decision-making styles (e.g.…”

Field experiment evidence of substantive, attributional, and behavioral persuasion by members of Congress in online town halls

“…Oftentimes, on topics such as immigration and terrorism, democratic politics centers on questions of good and bad, or right and wrong, and uses of governmental power and hence cannot be solved by coordination among constituents who share common interests (27). In these situations, leaders must use direct appeals to persuade their constituents.…”

The Dynamics of Centralized Procurement Reform in a Decentralized State: Evidence and Lessons from Indonesia

“…A central focus of recent literature on policy reform is on leadership and how leadership contributes to positive macro-economic, political and organizational outcomes and public goods provision (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011;Grindle, 2007Grindle, , 2004. For example, from an analysis of eight controlled case comparison in Indonesia, which includes 1,000 business surveys and 120 interviews, von finds that the quality of government leadership plays a central role in driving the quality of policy outcomes.…”

“…Research points to the role that leaders play in overcoming collective action and coordination problems within organizations by reducing information asymmetries and building trust between agents (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011;Calvert, 1992). Other research shows how leaders can effect change in an organization through the institutionalization of a system of rewards and punishment that shifts how individuals work together (Andreoni et al 2003).…”

“…A leader who can control the agenda can also shift the equilibrium from any status quo to almost any desired outcome (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011). In other words, in the presence of multiple equilibria, leaders can help to shift the group decision to their preferred outcome (Ahlquist and Levi 2011). Consequently, leaders often serve a narrow constituency at the expense of others.…”