Valenty, Feldman, and their contributors challenge the current state of political leadership studies by offering a variety of analytical methods from scholars around the world. While focused on American political leadership, the different approaches and vantage points offer fresh insights of the roles of cultural and political context, including the historical circumstance, environmental factors, and socialization agents that affect and shape American political leadership and performance. The highly unusual and valuable approach includes multidisciplinary perspectives with contributors from the fields of political science, political psychology, philosophy, sociology, and economics. Scholars, students, and researchers from a variety of disciplines will find the evaluations of the interaction between personality, leadership, decision making, and context invaluable.

This authoritative volume analyses the practice and impact of political leadership, aiming to position it within a more integrated framework.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

Discussing the major theories of political leadership with a focus on contemporary challenges that political leaders face worldwide, this research companion provides a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for an international readership. The editors combine empirical and normative approaches to emphasize the centrality of political culture, as well as the limits of culture and the universal demands of innovative adaptation. The volume examines: ¢

'The Encyclopedia of Leadership' brings together everything that is known and truly matters abour leadership as part of the human experience.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with top Chinese officials, parliamentarians, scholars, and businessmen, Willy Lam, a renowned journalist and writer on Chinese affairs, presents a first-hand, multi-dimensional account of twenty-first century China and the impact of fourth generation leaders, including President Hu Jinato and Premier Wen Jiabao. Lam goes behind the glitzy facade of nouveau-riche Beijing and Shanghai to examine how the Hu leadership has tried to extend the Communist Party's "mandate of heaven" by tackling an array of daunting problems: the weakening legitimacy of the Party's leadership; restive peasants; angry workers; political stagnation over the lack of reform; foreign relations difficulties; unreliable energy supplies; resurgent nationalism; and the increasingly dubious "Chinese model" of development. The author assesses possible contributions that the new classes of private businessmen, professionals, and intellectuals - as well as new ideas such as nationalism, globalization, and federalism - will make to economic prosperity and political liberalization. The book also includes a chapter on foreign policy, which contains an insightful account of Beijing's evolving and sometimes difficult relations with the United States, Europe, Japan, and other major countries and blocs, as well as the role of the People's Liberation Army.

Focusing on how policy makers make decisions in foreign policy, this book examines how beliefs are causal mechanisms which steer decisions, shape leaders and perceptions of reality, and lead to cognitive and motivated biases that distort, block and recast incoming information from the environment.

Leadership has never been more important – and divisive – than it is today. The idea and discourse of the leader remains a critical factor in organizational and societal performance, but there is evident tension between the persistent focus on the critical importance of individual leaders and the increasing emphasis on collective leadership. The Routledge Companion to Leadership provides a survey of the contentious and dynamic discipline of leadership. This collection covers key themes in the field, including advances in leadership theory, leadership in a range of contexts and geographies, leadership failure, leadership process, and leadership development. Topics range from micro studies to wider political analyses of leadership, taking in unusual but important aspects such as portrayals of leadership in architecture, media, and science fiction. Contributions from 61 internationally renowned authors from 16 countries make available the full range of perspectives, approaches, and insights on the idea of leadership. Providing both a social sciences and a psychological approach, these go beyond common themes to offer diverse perspectives on such topics as emotion and leadership, portrayals of leadership. This volume situates leadership debates and evidence within contemporary leadership crises, while ensuring that the explorations of the issues are of enduring relevance. With wide and critical coverage of the key topics and potent contextualization of themes in current events, The Routledge Companion to Leadership is the ideal resource for graduate study in leadership.

Building on recent theories of interactive governance and political leadership, Interactive Political Leadership develops a concept of interactive political leadership and a theoretical framework for studying the role of elected politicians in the age of governance. The purpose of the theoretical framework is to inspire and guide empirical research into how elected politicians perform political leadership in a society where citizens and other stakeholders play an active role in making and implementing political decisions and what barriers, challenges, and dilemmas they encounter in relation to the performance of interactive political leadership. The research framework draws extensively on recent theories of interactive governance and political leadership and other new developments in political science and public administration research. Moreover, it finds inspiration in current tendencies and embryonic examples of interactive political leadership performed by elected politicians operating at different levels of governance in Western liberal democracies. The basic assumption is that political legitimacy is essential for the survival of a political system, and that interactive political leadership stands out as a promising way of securing what political scientists denote as input-, throughput-, output-, and outcome legitimacy in the age of governance. Hence, interactive political leadership aims to establish a bridge between representative democracy and emergent forms of political participation, to promote political learning and accountability, to strengthen the political entrepreneurship of elected politicians, and to advance the political system's implementation capacity through resource mobilization. The book develops 20 propositions that sets the agenda for a new and much needed field of empirical research into political leadership in the age of governance.

The United States faces the problems of ever-growing government, declining political participation, and the deterioration of moral society. It is a tumultuous and often troubling time in history. In Horse Sense for the New Millennium, author Wesley Allen Riddle offers a lens for interpreting modern political events and presents a conservative commentary on American life and politics. A collection of previously published columns, Horse Sense for the New Millennium offers a reservoir of creative conservative approaches distinct from more common ones advocated by progressive liberals. Compiling a decade of thoughts, Riddle discusses the state of American politics and government and shows that hope for Americas future lies in returning to the nations founding principles and applying them to the problems facing America today. He argues that the road map for success lies in the US Constitution. Horse Sense for the New Millennium presents an articulate and passionate critique of government in modern society including governments taking on too many roles, too many rules and regulations, and creating a nanny state that is socially and economically crippling the nation. Riddle explains the founders original intent and demonstrates their vision is still the key to Americas prosperity.