Aftermath and Outputs; Political Elites, Leaders and Their Consequences

This Section is sponsored by the ECPR Standing Group on Elites and Political Leadership, which at present has over 250 members and follows the success of last year’s Elites and Political Leadership Section at the Oslo General Conference, For Oslo, the Standing Group requested eight Panels and we were assigned six Panels only. As a result of the large number of Paper proposals submitted we were asked to organise additional Panels. Ten strong Panels were eventually convened in Oslo – each with four Paper presenters and dedicated Chairs and Discussants. Feedback on the Oslo conference from the Standing Group membership was very positive and we now have nine Panels in our Section in Hamburg. The Panels have contributions from scholars who are interested in the impact of and effect of political elites on policy and the outputs related to those policy domains. We move this research agenda towards the study of policy-specific sectors, the variation across democratic and semi-democratic/authoritarian systems, the evolution of the background of elites involved in policy-making, as well as how to scrutinize and measure their performance.