Political Capital and the Dynamics of Leadership: Exploring the Leadership Capital Index

The study of political leadership (success and failure) has been given increased urgency by the global economic crisis and emergent crisis in the EU. Political capital has an application to the fundamental nature of political leadership: it combines institutional and discernible attributes with less tangible ‘moral’ qualities and skills (Kane 2001). The notion of political capital rests on a finance analogy: politicians gain, invest, lose or even squander the ‘credit’ gifted to them by the sum of their constituencies and stakeholders. The workshop explores the dynamics of political leaders’ ability to act and govern. The central analytical tool around which the workshop will revolve is that of political capital and the trajectory of political leadership as it ebbs and flows before its inevitable decline. The applicants have developed a Leadership Capital Index (LCI) to enable a systematic tracking of the political momentum leaders enjoy. It is a multidimensional instrument which aims to take the discussion of leadership legitimacy beyond the narrow band of popularity/electoral support which dominates the polling approach to assessing leaders (Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy, 2012). It offers a conceptual framework specifying both the sources and observable impacts of leadership capital, allowing a more rigorous form of explanation and evaluation of political leaders’ trajectories. This workshop will further develop, operationalize and strengthen the LCI in a cross-country comparative setting. This will be achieved through the development of a series of country profiles and comparative analyses with scholars using the LCI to examine the political fortunes of leaders past and present. The workshop will also develop the LCI theoretically, further operationalize measures and rigorously test its applicability to a wide variety of contexts and scenarios. It is expected that the workshop will form the basis for a journal special issue or edited book.