Conclusion

Chapter 11 aggregates the conceptual developments and theoretical argument and research findings presented in the previous chapters into a theoretical framework for studying the political leadership of elected politicians in the age of governance. The framework suggests that interactive political leadership holds the potential to promote robust political authorization in the age of governance through a promotion of interactive democracy, political learning accountability, interactive political entrepreneurship, and socio-political implementation. Conditioning factors are multi-level governance, an increased mediatization of political communication and access to interactive political platforms and arenas. Moreover, the chapter provides twenty propositions regarding the prospects for, and dilemmas and challenges related to the performance of interactive political leadership that can guide and inspire future research. Finally, the chapter proposes an agenda for future research and highlights the need for empirical studies on the scope for interactive political leadership in different contexts, discourse analyses of current understandings of political leadership and followership, process studies of the interplay between politicians and citizens, and studies of the impact of institutional design on political leadership styles.

Political Leadership Performance in a Mediatized World

Political communication is becoming increasingly mediatized. Mediatization refers both to a gradual increase in the role of the media in political communication and the spillover effects that this increase has had on the way politics takes place and is organized and relatedly, the performance of political leadership. Of particular importance for political leadership styles is the surge of drama politics, the fragmentation of political communication and the active role of citizens in political communication. Chapter 9’s typology of democratic political leadership performance lays the ground for an analysis of how paternalist, populist, engaged, and interactive political leadership styles are affected by the increased mediatization. The analysis suggests that an interactive political leadership style is more viable than the other three political leadership styles to patterns of mediatization in the age of governance.

Democratic Perspectives on Interactive Political Leadership

Representative democracy is in transition in theory as well as in practice, and this transition affects the way we think about political leadership and democratic representation. New theories of democracy challenge traditional understandings of what it entails to represent the people, and a mushrooming of new forms of political participation destabilizes traditional views of the role of citizens in democratic decision-making. Chapter 4 shows how these theoretical and empirical developments, which are partially triggered by inherent tensions in democratic thought, promote a turn towards interactive forms of political leadership. Interactive political leadership can potentially alleviate the tensions in democratic thought and strengthen the input legitimacy of representative democracy in times of declining trust in politicians. A turn to interactive political leadership is no panacea. It triggers new dilemmas and challenges for elected politicians.

Multi-Level Political Leadership: Dynamics and Conditions

In the age of governance, political leadership is a multi-level activity. Multi-level governance research shows that policy-making at national, transnational, and subnational levels of governance is increasingly tangled, interconnected, and overlapping. Political leadership research has mainly focused on how politicians perform political leadership at a single level of governance, however. Chapter 8 develops a concept of multi-level political leadership, which aims to capture how political leadership involves efforts to affect decisions made by politicians appointed at other levels of governance. The conditions and opportunities for performing multi-level political leadership vary between politicians authorized at transnational, national, and subnational levels of governance. Community sentiments are not equally strong among all citizens; politicians at different levels do not have the same type and amount of NATO resources; public attention varies; and the impact and influence that national, transnational and sub-national politicians are expected to have differ. In light of these differences, expectations are that transnational and subnational politicians are more likely to embrace a multi-level leadership approach than national politicians will.

Enhancing Policy Implementation through Interactive Political Leadership

The legitimacy of representative democracy hinges on its ability to implement the policies that politicians make. Citizens may experience that their interests and viewpoints are taken into account in the political process, that the political process is fair, and that policies made are relevant and convincing responses to the problems they experience and aspirations they have. If policy implementation fails, it is likely to have a negative effect on citizens’ assessments of the efficiency and effectiveness of the political system, its executive institutions, and the competence and skill of incumbent political authorities. It reduces the political system’s outcome legitimacy. New theories of co-production and co-creation and research into how public and private actors work together to promote public value suggest that successful implementation of policy outcomes is more likely when relevant and affected societal actors are involved. This involving approach to getting things done leads to the formulation of a concept of socio-political implementation referring to co-created policy-implementation. Most of the socio-political implementation research tends to overlook the important role of politics and political leadership for successful co-creation of policy implementation. Chapter 7 argues that politicians have a crucial role to play as interactive political leaders of co-created policy implementation.

Leadership in the Age of Governance

Building on an extensive literature on interactive governance, Chapter 2 explains what it entails to be in the age of governance and scrutinizes the implications for the performance of public leadership. A key message is that public leadership increasingly takes on the form of metagovernance, i.e. the governance of governance. As meta-governors, public leaders govern self-regulating actors through different hands-off and hands-on regulation methods. Forty years of government reforms have gradually restructured the public sector to support the performance of metagovernance, and inspiration came from different strands of neo-institutionalism. Metagovernance research has mainly focused on managerial metagovernance, however, while paying scant attention to political metagovernance and the role of politicians as leaders of interactive governance processes. Recent strands of political leadership theory provide important insights for developing a notion of political metagovernance and get to grips with the role of politicians in the age of governance.

Institutionalizing Interactive Political Leadership

A key factor that conditions the political leadership of elected politicians is the institutional structure of representative democracy. Political institutions constrain as well as enable political leadership. They regulate what politicians can do, and grant them the authority and legitimacy needed to act in the name of the members of the political community. Then, how do the institutions of representative democracy condition the performance of interactive political leadership? Chapter 10 shows that although the formal structure of representative democracy tends to encourage political competition, the non-formal political institutions promote political bargaining, negotiation and collaboration between political elites. Although neither the formal nor the non-formal institutions promote interaction between politicians and citizens, it takes relatively small-scale reforms to enable politicians to perform interactive political leadership. Political leaders are not only institution-takers but also institution-makers and it is their prerogative to improve the institutional conditions for performing interactive political leadership in representative democracies. A review of recent institutional reforms testifies to a growing interest among politicians in promoting dialogue between politicians and citizens around agenda-setting, policy innovation, and policy application.

Interactive Political Leadership as a Driver of Policy Innovation

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, enhancing the public sector’s innovation capacity has been high on the agenda of many Western governments. Fiscal constraints and mounting policy problems related to public health, crime prevention, elderly care, immigration, and global warming have intensified the search for new innovative policy strategies and governance methods. Leadership is often mentioned as a key driver of and condition for promoting public innovation but most attention has been paid to the role of public managers as drivers of policy innovation, and the approach to innovation has been managerial rather than political. The main argument made in Chapter 6 is that the public sector’s policy innovation capacity ultimately hinges on the extent to which politicians step into the role of policy entrepreneurs and perform leadership of collective policy innovation processes, rather than leaving this task to public managers. Although there are barriers and dilemmas to overcome, interactive political leadership offers an opportunity for politicians to step into the role of policy entrepreneurs and, by doing so, strengthen the output legitimacy of representative democracy.

Towards a Concept of Interactive Political Leadership

Chapter 3 examines what political leadership means in the age of governance. In unison, theories of metagovernance and recent theories of political leadership provide the necessary building blocks for developing a concept of interactive political leadership that captures what political leadership implies in a context where the members of the political community take an active part in governing society. While metagovernance theory highlights the role of hands-off and hands-on forms of governance in regulating self-governance, new theories of political leadership provide a helpful redefinition of the role of power and the relationship between leaders and followers in political leadership. These important insights pave the way for the development of a concept of interactive political leadership and a specification of nine tasks for political leaders in multi-actor policy-making. The chapter concludes by listing a number of challenges and dilemmas facing politicians who aspire to become interactive political leaders.

Promoting Political Accountability through Interactive Political Leadership

The age of governance challenges traditional understandings and methods for holding political decision-makers to account. A hitherto-hegemonic party government approach to political accountability is losing ground to new theoretical perceptions of political accountability, and forty years of government reforms have brought with them a variety of new methods for holding public authorities to account. What unites these theoretical and empirical developments is a redefinition of what political accountability means and how it is to be obtained in a multi-actor governance context where not only governments but also a wide variety of political and social actors play an active and influential role in the policy-making process. Chapter 5 proposes a concept of political learning accountability, and argues that interactive political leadership offers itself as a suitable strategy for promoting the throughput legitimacy of representative democracy by involving citizens and stakeholders in concrete policy-making.