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The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership

Online ISBN:
9780191749711
Print ISBN:
9780199653881
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership

R. A. W. Rhodes (ed.),
R. A. W. Rhodes
(ed.)
Social Sciences, University of Southampton
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R. A. W. Rhodes is Professor of Government (Research) and Director of the Centre for Political Ethnography at the University of Southampton, and Adjunct Professor, Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is the author or editor of forty-two books including, most recently Networks, Governance and the Differentiated Polity. Selected Essays, Volume I. (Oxford University Press, 2017), Interpretive Political Science. Selected Essays, Volume II (Oxford University Press, 2017), and the Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science (with Mark Bevir; Routledge 2015). He is Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK). In 2015, the ECPR awarded him their biennial Lifetime Achievement Award for his ‘outstanding contribution to all areas of political science, and the exceptional impact of his work’.

Paul 't Hart (ed.)
Paul 't Hart
(ed.)
School of Governance, Utrecht University
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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.

Published online:
2 September 2014
Published in print:
1 May 2014
Online ISBN:
9780191749711
Print ISBN:
9780199653881
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

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.

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