Understanding Political Leadership

This introductory chapter sets out the conceptual and methodological rationale for the book. The chapter reviews the field and places this new approach within the context of current leadership research. The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) builds on advances in understanding of how to track and assess political leadership. It offers the concept of “leadership capital,” as an aggregate of authority that reaches across the traditional divide between structure and agency through a flexible analytical tool. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. The chapter sets out how this tool is utilized in the examination of the eleven-country case studies to better understand and explain the “puzzles” of contemporary political leadership.