Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--as the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

R. A. W. Rhodes is Professor of Government (Research) at the University of Southampton (UK); Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia); and Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Newcastle (UK). Previously, he was the Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council's 'Whitehall Programme' (1994-1999); Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University (2006-11); and Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (2007-8). He is the author or editor of some 30 books. He is life Vice-President of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom; a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK). He has also been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and he was editor of Public Administration from 1986 to 2011. Paul 't Hart is Professor of Public Administration at the Utrecht School of Governance, which he joined in 2001. He is also associate Dean at the Netherlands School of Government in The Hague. He was previously at Leiden University's Department of Public Administration from 1987-2004, and has held visiting positions at the University of Canberra, Nuffield College Oxford, and the Stockholm Centre of Organizational Research (SCORE) of Stockholm University. Between 2001-2005, he was adjunct professor of public management at the Swedish Defence College in Stockholm. He has authored or edited 20 books in English and a further 14 in Dutch.