The Resources of Leadership – How Leaders became what they are

Abstract

This panel addresses questions about resources of leaders in the socio-political area (parties, governments, administration, interest groups) from different perspectives. The debate on central elements of political leadership interconnects several research strands. In detail the resource capacities of a leader consist not only in personal or structural sources but also may include collective, individual, external and internal resources leaders rely on; or not since leaders’ capacity of successfully mobilizing those resources has not been investigated so far. The panel addresses the existing research and groundwork on the leadership capital index (LCI; Bennister, t’Hart & Worthy 2015), on political elite recruiting (Cross & Pilet 2015; Dowding & Dumont 2015) and the presidentialization of politics (Poguntke & Webb 2005; Skowronek 2011) induced by the idea of putting together those research strands on leadership not only theoretically but also methodologically. Accordingly, leadership capital consists of skills, reputation and relations of the leader within and outside a political organization (Bennister, t’Hart et al. 2015). This approach draws from political capital; deliberations and investigations of whether this is connected to other capital sorts and an emerging power field (Bourdieu 1986) appear fruitful to explore. Specific resources for leaders’ individual power then play a crucial role: Internal power as relations networks within the leader’s organization, institutional resources like bureaus, staff, (state-)subsidies, individual skills (Jentges 2017), communicative action (Heffernan 2006), and political authority (Skowronek 2011). The first (internal power) tends intra-organizational recruiting and election processes, whereas the latter (political authority) is crucial, for instance, in political parties. Within this field Schier (2011) suggests indicators to measure political authority: party leaders’ job approval, party identification of voters with the party leaders’ party, party membership, and party voting support in parliament (degree of voting for or against initiatives of the party leader). Resulting theses from the triad of political authority, political capital and power use are: A potential unsuccessful leader has been caught by the ‘political power trap’ as a consequence of an imbalance between the triad’s elements. A candidate with a high leadership capital, balanced with political authority and power use, has, however, most resources at hand to become a leader. Used by an incumbent or a running candidate in intra-organizational selection procedures the triad serves as a scheme to stimulate further work on the issue of political leadership. Moreover, political organizations’ vertical levels (from local to global) and analytical levels (from micro to macro) stipulate the range for political leadership and the balancing of resource capacities for political leadership. All in all, considering new theoretical and methodological approaches provides an advanced understanding of resource capacities regarding leadership. Linked to this, it is interesting to ask how leaders can mobilize their resources successfully or unsuccessfully and which of mentioned or other components are causal for success or failure and why. The panel seeks papers that deal theoretically or methodologically with resource approaches and/or address empirically forms of political leadership with case studies. Scholars from all proveniences and career stages are encouraged to submit their proposals.