Can Political Leaders Benefit from ‘Negative Resources’? The Contingent Effects of Structural and Contextual Constraints on the Leadership Performance of Presidents and Prime Ministers

In studies on political leaders and leadership, resources are usually conceptualized as the opposite to different forms of constraints. While resources are considered to empower leaders, constraints are believed to check leaders, and effectively limit their opportunities to perform successfully. This corresponds closely with the conventional wisdom about the conditions of success and failure in political leadership. As Gordon Smith suggested a quarter of a century or so ago, however, resources can be ambiguous, and some of them can have a negative rather than a positive value (Smith 1991). Taking this one step further, the ambiguous nature of constraints can be conceptually captured by referring to them as ‘negative resources’, which, under certain conditions, may help a leader to perform in a way that is being perceived favourably. The notion of ‘negative resources’ also suggests that potentially constraining features of a leader’s environment are dynamic and can be dealt with by leaders in fundamentally different ways. With a focus on political chief executives (that is, presidents and prime ministers) from the advanced democracies, this paper first revisits, and challenges, the established position that the ample availability of resources necessarily benefits political leaders. It then goes on to explore the conditions under which leaders can possibly profit from facing major structural and/or contextual constraints, or ‘negative resources’, and seeks to establish why this should be so.