Role of Character-Leaders in Development as Depicted in Swahili Literary Texts

It has always been believed by the majority that elected leaders are a necessary component in the development of any country and more so in the developing world. This is so strong in that leaders are elected by their people through a competitive election because they believe they will influence economic development positively. Writers of literature are born and bred in the communities where they equally participate in the process of electing their leaders. Thus, when they write about the maxima or minimal roles played by these leaders in impacting economic development, they are believed to portray a true and to some extent a believable picture of the state of development in their respective communities. In this respect, this paper analyses the role played by the elected leaders in the realization of economic development in the third world as portrayed in selected Swahili literary texts. To achieve our main objective, the paper surveys the challenges of the third world and shows how the elected leaders tackle them to realize economic success. The paper concludes that elected leaders have downplayed their role in enhancing economic development and the result is underdevelopment experienced in the third world worse than that of the colonial leaders

Dictators Differ From Democratically Elected Leaders in Facial Warmth

Despite the many important considerations relevant to selecting a leader, facial appearance carries surprising sway. Following numerous studies documenting the role of facial appearance in government elections, we investigated differences in perceptions of dictators versus democratically elected leaders. Participants in Study 1 successfully classified pictures of 160 world leaders as democrats or dictators significantly better than chance. Probing what distinguished them, separate participants rated the affect, attractiveness, competence, dominance, facial maturity, likability, and trustworthiness of the leaders’ faces in Study 2. Relating these perceptions to the categorizations made by participants in Study 1 showed that democratically elected leaders looked significantly more attractive and warmer (an average of likability and trustworthiness) than dictators did. Leaders’ facial appearance could therefore contribute to their success within their respective political systems.

Politics, pandemics, and support: the role of political actors in Dutch state aid during COVID-19

How do governments distribute resources across economic sectors during a crisis? And why do some sectors receive more than others? The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of these questions. In this paper, we explore the extent to which a political economy perspective can help explain the characteristics of sector-specific state aid in the Netherlands, a traditionally corporatist country. While KLM, the biggest player in the Dutch aviation sector, was promised loans worth €3.4 billion, the horeca (hospitality) sector was denied a similar deal. Limited cross-case analysis eliminates purely economic accounts. We employed process-tracing and analyzed hundreds of national media articles to understand the influence of elected leaders, interest groups, and experts. We find that, against the backdrop of economic concerns, vote-seeking behavior by elected leaders as well as the strength and organization of interest groups influenced how much each sector could expect. Meanwhile, policy-seeking behavior helps explain the form that aid took. Our findings highlight the need to consider fiscal support in political economy terms, even during crises, and to explore the composition of state aid, not just its presence or amount.

The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that majoritarians’ desire to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

Dynamics of Regional Development in Regional and Municipal Economy

This article deals with the dynamics of territory development in the regional and municipal economy. The development of the territory is and has always been limited or restricted by the available sources of capital, the dynamics of its use, and the localization of its distribution in the chosen territory. Today’s limits are, under Czech conditions, laid down by the Building Act; namely, the land-use plan, the strategic plans for development, and the political mechanisms of the elected leaders. The verbalization of the democratization of the economy is swayed by the concepts of meritocratic holding and the attempts to create values, but also by already existing values. We interpret the term values as infrastructure developed in the past, but also as resources given by the natural, geographic, and other environments.

Consolidating Democracy in Kenya (1920-1963)

This article sets out to trace the road to democracy in the colonial Kenya, though with a bias to electoral contests, from 1920 to 1963. With its own elected leaders, the article hypothesizes, a society has a critical foundation because elected people are ordinarily meant to address cutting-edge issues facing a given society. Such concerns would include: socio-economic concerns such as poverty, corruption, racism, marginalization of minority, ethnic bigotry, economic rejuvenation, gender justice, and health of the people among other concerns. Methodologically, the article focusses more on the 1920 and the 1957 general elections. This is due to their unique positioning in the Kenyan historiography. In 1920, for instance, a semblance of democracy was witnessed in Kenya when the European-Settler-Farmers’ inspired elections took place, after their earlier protests in 1911.

Procedural fairness and nepotism among local traditional and democratic leaders in rural Namibia

This study tests the common conception that democratically elected leaders behave in the interest of their constituents more than traditional chiefs do. Our sample includes 64 village leaders and 384 villagers in rural Namibia, where democratically elected leaders and traditional chiefs coexist. We analyze two main attributes of local political leaders: procedural fairness preferences and preferential treatment of relatives (nepotism). We also measure personality traits and social preferences, and conduct standardized surveys on local governance practices and villagers’ perceptions of their leaders’ performance. Our results indicate that traditional chiefs are as likely to implement fair, democratic decision-making procedures, and are as unlikely to be nepotistic. Moreover, elected leaders and chiefs express similar social preferences and personality traits. These findings align with villagers’ perceptions of most leaders in our sample as being popular and fair, and villagers’ responses reveal a discrepancy between planned and de facto implementation of democratic institutions.

Executive Turnover and the Investigation of Former Leaders in New Democracies

What prompts governments in new democracies to investigate elected leaders once they leave office? Theorizing about democratic regimes suggests that leadership turnover by constitutional means should generate few such cases: democratic entry to and exit from office are thought to prompt benign treatment from successor administrations. Yet over a third of democratically elected presidents and prime ministers who left office between 1970 and 2011 have faced investigations for malfeasance. This study analyzes the conditions that generate such cases. We find that the odds of investigation rise when there is strong evidence of former leaders’ personal culpability; but also when the executive regime is presidential, and the judiciary lacks independence from other branches. Partisanship has a more limited impact: co-partisanship with the incumbent reduces the odds of investigation for ex-prime ministers, but sharing a party label with an incumbent offers no such protection to a former president.

“Leadership as a social problem”: A conversational engagement with the ideas of Alvin Gouldner

Sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner’s (1950) book of original and previously published chapters collected under the title Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action opens with the proclamation: “Leadership as a Social Problem.” Although Gouldner’s work is rarely cited in contemporary critical leadership discourse, he and his coauthors make an important contribution to an analysis of the potentially counter-democratic role of leaders. By using an unusual methodology—an imagined conversational engagement between this article’s author and Gouldner (who has been dead for 40 years)—the article offers an historical appraisal of the contribution of Studies in Leadership to critical leadership; a contribution that is especially relevant when elected leaders are undermining the institutions and norms that together maintain democratic societies.