{"id":1252,"date":"2015-03-26T09:48:53","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T09:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canterburypolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2018-09-11T13:56:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T12:56:41","slug":"the-diminishing-returns-of-leadership-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/2015\/03\/26\/the-diminishing-returns-of-leadership-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"The Diminishing Returns of Leadership Capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can we measure leadership? What makes a leader succeed or fail? Dr Mark Bennister has been gathering scholars together to investigate the idea of \u2018leadership capital\u2019 and offer a way to understand why some leaders \u2018spend\u2019 their \u2018capital\u2019 successfully and others squander or waste it. Dr Bennister is co-convenor of the<\/strong>PSA Political Leadership Specialist Group<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and is leading a section on political leadership at the\u00a0<\/strong>2015 ECPR general Conference in Montreal in August<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

2014 was the year of \u2018Capital\u2019 thanks to Thomas Piketty. Piketty\u2019s weighty tome breathed new life into economic analysis of economic inequality.\u00a0 Capital, for Piketty is a stock \u2013 its wealth comes from what has been accumulated in all prior years combined. So what happens if we take a concept of accumulated capital and apply it to political leadership? This presents us with alternative method of understanding why political leaders succeed or fail, how they remain in office, and how they win elections.<\/p>\n

If we take the definitions of capital by Piketty and others and apply them to leadership we can think of political capital as a stock of \u2018credit\u2019 accumulated\u00a0by and importantly gifted to politicians, in this case leaders. Piketty uses it to explain the gap between income and wealth, here though political capital is used as shorthand to describe if leaders are up or down, how popular they are and how much credit they have in the political sphere. Like financial capital, commentators and politicians speak of it going \u2018up\u2019 or \u2018down\u2019 or \u2018gained\u2019 or, much more commonly, \u2018lost\u2019. Most importantly, it\u2019s often seen as something finite-you only have so much and it quickly depreciates under pressure of the media, opposition or events.<\/p>\n

Politicians themselves are acutely aware of their finite \u2018stock\u2019 of authority and the ticking clock. Having plenty of this \u2018credit\u2019 means a leader can lets of things done by \u2018spending\u2019 or \u2018leveraging it\u2019- think Tony Blair in 1997 or\u00a0Barack Obama in 2009<\/a> when their support, popularity and momentum temporarily made them politically unassailable. They believe they can pass laws, set agendas and dominate the \u2018narrative\u2019. Tony Blair, reflecting in his autobiography, spoke of how he was a capital \u2018hoarder\u2019, trying not to \u2018spend\u2019 his authority in his early years as Prime Minister:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, in those early months and perhaps in much of that initial term of office, I had political capital that I tended to hoard. I was risking it but within strict limits and looking to recoup it as swiftly as possible\u2026 in domestic terms, I tried to reform with the grain of opinion not against it\u201d (Blair 2010: 123).<\/p>\n

Understanding leadership capital<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond economic salience, journalistic shorthand and politicians own words, academics have defined political capital in a variety of ways. It can be about trust, networks and \u2018moral\u2019 or ethical reputation. It can be about building bottom up influence and top down elite authority. In work with Professor Paul \u2018t Hart (Utrecht) and Dr Ben Worthy (Birkbeck), we focus on concepts of political leadership from the top \u2013 exercising authority. By incorporating many of these ideas, drawn from political psychology, sociology, political science and business we develop a notion of\u00a0leadership capital<\/a>\u00a0as a measure of the extent to which political office-holders can effectively attain and wield authority.<\/p>\n

We define leadership capital as an aggregate of three leadership components:\u00a0skills<\/em>,\u00a0relations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0reputation<\/em>. We work this is into a Leadership Capital Index (LCI), for those that like such measurement tools. The Index has ten simple variables to enable leaders to be scored, using a mixed methods approach to capture both quantitative data and qualitative assessments.<\/p>\n

You can see our full article in West European Politics\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and more details on our measuring leadership\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(This post was originally published on the Policy and Politics Journal blog:\u00a0http:\/\/policyandpoliticsblog.com\/2015\/03\/24\/the-diminishing-returns-of-leadership-capital\/<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How can we measure leadership?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161081,"featured_media":13,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[317,1365,1369,1445,1753],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-british-politics","tag-leadership","tag-leadership-capital","tag-mark-bennister","tag-political-leadership"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Anna Vanaga","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/645\/2018\/08\/blogs-holding680x453.jpg","postExcerpt":"How can we measure leadership?","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4221,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/4221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}