Leadership and Political Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The distribution of agency among political actors is not uniform. Some seem to get more of what there is to get than others (to paraphrase Laswell). An implicit assumption in classic social science literature is that some political agents are better endowed than others and therefore a skewed distribution in achievement can be traced to the variation in ability, motivation, charisma and political capital of political actors. This is only part of the picture though. A wide range of empirical studies confirm the presence of a power law in social relations. A power law distribution of political ties implies that social networks are not uniformly distributed and network analysis has to be factored into political analysis. We are interested in all extraordinary political agents, such as leaders, political entrepreneurs, brokers and innovators. These are actors often credited with remarkable socio-political outcomes and transformational effects on social structure. We are interested in papers exploring the relevance of ties and social structure to the effectiveness of political agents. Does structural advantage (brokerage, centrality etc) translate into political advantage, as mediated through the agency of astute leaders or political entrepreneurs?

Title	Details
Agency and Leadership in the Post-Fukushima Nuclear Energy Discourse in Germany	View Paper Details
Decoupling Brokerage in Policy Networks: A Longitudinal Analysis of Strategic Behaviour	View Paper Details
My Body is Here, My Mind is There: An Analysis of the Role of the Diasporic Community in Proto-Revolutionary Tunisian Cyberactivism	View Paper Details
Political Networks and Leaders of Elite Groups in Georgia and Ukraine	View Paper Details