The Missing Link: Studying Political Leadership from the Followers’ Perspective

„If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership.” This provocative statement on the leader-centric perspective of leadership studies was formulated by James McGregor Burns (1978: 1). In his seminal work, Burns (1978: 3) foresaw the need for studying followership and followers to understand leadership. After all, as the commonplace states, there is no leader or leadership without followers. Nevertheless, followership has got little attention in mainstream political science, as well as in political leadership studies. In political science, candidate evaluations have been included as possible factors in voting behavior (“leader effects”, “personalization”), but scientific interest and systematic research on this topic still lag far behind that dedicated to parties, issues, and ideologies (cf. Lobo, 2014). As demonstrated by the mixed results (Bittner, 2011; Lobo and Curtice, 2015; cf. Aarts et al., 2011; King, 2002), political scientists haven’t followed a clear and unified theoretical and methodological approach to understand the dynamics of political leadership in the electoral context. Another common reason for the ignorance of followers is the negative normative and passive connotations of the concept in contrast to the notions of voter or citizen (cf. Barber, 2000). In contrast, students of political leadership overemphasize the role and capacity of formal power-holders as well as the institutional resources in the leadership process (Blondel, 1987: 45–49; Elgie, 2015: 30–32; 137–170, 2018). This leader-centric perspective could be surprising in the light of the dominance of “interactionist paradigm” (Elgie, 2015: 1–29), which takes more explicitly account of the agency-structure problem and the relationship between followers and leaders, but it is also understandable since the leaders are the most spectacular element of political leadership providing numerous empirical evidence. However, in recent years the call for more follower-centric researches constantly grew louder among the students of political leadership (Hartley, 2018: 209–210) following the strengthening trend in generic leadership literature (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). The results of some remarkable studies (e.g. Bligh et al., 2004; Carsten et al., 2019) support further research focused on followers’ beliefs and perceptions as an important enabler factor for political leadership. Naturally, these researches do not question or reduce the significance of leaders’ actions, behaviors, and rhetoric, but simply stress that followers play a vital role in the leadership process. This paper aims to answer this call by providing a systematic review of follower-centric theoretical models, methods, and empirical results of generic leadership literature. It focuses on two theoretical traditions of follower-centric leadership studies namely the romance of leadership thesis (Meindl, 1990, 1995; Meindl et al., 1985; See: Bligh and Schyns, 2007; Bligh et al., 2011) and the social identity theory of leadership (Haslam et al., 2011; Hogg, 2001; Hogg et al., 2012; van Knippenberg and Hogg, 2003). Although most of these researches were not conducted in a political context, they can provide important lessons for political leadership studies and open the floor for further empirical researches.