This edited book will make an important, timely, and innovative contribution to the now flourishing academic discipline of political leadership studies. We have developed a conceptual framework of leadership capital and a diagnostic tool—the Leadership Capital Index (LCI)—to measure and evaluate the fluctuating nature of leadership capital. Differing amounts of leadership capital, a combination of skills, relations, and reputation, allow leaders to succeed or fail. This book brings together leading international scholars to engage with the concept of “leadership capital” and apply the LCI to a variety of comparative case studies. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. In each case, leaders “spend” and put their “stock” of authority and support at risk. United States president, Lyndon Johnson, arm-twisting Congress to put into effect civil rights legislation, Tony Blair taking the United Kingdom into the invasion of Iraq, Angela Merkel committing Germany to a generous reception of refugees: all ‘spent capital’ to forge public policy they believed in. We are interested in how office-holders acquire, consolidate, risk, and lose such capital. This volume concentrates predominantly on elected ‘chief executives’ at the national level, including majoritarian and consensus systems, multiple and singular cases. We also consider some presidential and sub-national cases. The purpose of the exercise is indeed exploratory: the chapters are a series of plausibility probes, to see how the LCI framework ‘performs’ as a descriptive and analytical tool.
