Empathy in Politics and Leadership
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A01=Claire Yorke
Angela Merkel
Author_Claire Yorke
Barack Obama
business
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Category=JPA
Category=JPH
Category=KJMB
Category=QDTS
Category=VSPQ
Donald Trump
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eq_business-finance-law
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_self-help
eq_society-politics
executive education
Jacinda Ardern
Joe Biden
leadership
left wing
Nelson Mandela
polarization
politics
right wing
sympathy
workshop
Product details
- ISBN 9780300259605
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A timely account of empathy, politics, and leadership, showing how greater understanding and connection can foster trust, community, and innovation
Empathy has become a cliché of contemporary politics, often espoused but rarely understood. Yet the capacity to understand other worldviews is neither easy nor comfortable. Seeing through others’ eyes requires strength, courage, integrity, and an ability to reason across the harshest political divides—and, in a time of heightened marginalization, disconnection, and polarization, empathy in our leaders and across society is vitally important.
Claire Yorke offers the first account of empathy in politics and leadership, drawing on examples from across the world. Including model leaders like Nelson Mandela and Jacinda Ardern, as well as figures on the right such as Donald Trump who mobilize different forms of empathy, Yorke asks what distinguishes empathetic leaders from the rest, and examines why empathy is essential for a more human-centred politics. Demonstrating empathy’s radical potential and disputing its connotations of weakness, this book shows how we can build a political ecosystem that fosters belonging and engagement—and cultivate the necessary dialogue to find common ground.
Empathy has become a cliché of contemporary politics, often espoused but rarely understood. Yet the capacity to understand other worldviews is neither easy nor comfortable. Seeing through others’ eyes requires strength, courage, integrity, and an ability to reason across the harshest political divides—and, in a time of heightened marginalization, disconnection, and polarization, empathy in our leaders and across society is vitally important.
Claire Yorke offers the first account of empathy in politics and leadership, drawing on examples from across the world. Including model leaders like Nelson Mandela and Jacinda Ardern, as well as figures on the right such as Donald Trump who mobilize different forms of empathy, Yorke asks what distinguishes empathetic leaders from the rest, and examines why empathy is essential for a more human-centred politics. Demonstrating empathy’s radical potential and disputing its connotations of weakness, this book shows how we can build a political ecosystem that fosters belonging and engagement—and cultivate the necessary dialogue to find common ground.
Claire Yorke is senior lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University, Canberra, where she teaches leaders and public servants from around the world about the importance of empathy. Her research has been widely published in prestigious journals.
