Britain’s COVID-19 battle: The role of political leaders in shaping the responses to the pandemic
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231159021 |
| Author | Consuelo Thiers,Leslie Wehner |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section: The Global Politics of the Covid-19 Pandemic |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231159021
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(3) 517 –534
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481231159021
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Britain’s COVID-19 battle:
The role of political leaders in
shaping the responses to the
pandemic
Consuelo Thiers1 and Leslie Wehner2
Abstract
This article introduces an analytical framework to trace and compare leaders’ different types of
behaviours to the health crisis posed by COVID-19, following the analytical benefits of Leadership
Trait Analysis. It examines Boris Johnson’s and Nicola Sturgeon’s diverging initial responses to the
pandemic’s onset. We employ the Leadership Trait Analysis to shed light on three main differences
in their respective leadership styles: risk-proneness versus risk-aversion; flexibility versus rigidity
and rule advocacy versus rule ambivalence. Crises are one of the more fruitful situations in which
to study leaders as their personal characteristics become central to the decision-making process.
Thus, we employ an agent-centred and political psychology approach to analyse leaders’ behaviour
and make sense of their divergent management styles. The results show that the differences
between these leaders’ approaches to handling this global health crisis can be partly explained by
their level of openness to information and their task versus relationship focus.
Keywords
Boris Johnson, COVID-19 crisis, leadership styles, Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), Nicola
Sturgeon, personality traits, United Kingdom
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic affected all countries of the world and became one of the most
significant crises ever for national leaders. While the risks coming with the pandemic are
similar in nature for different countries, the ways in which leaders have confronted such
challenges have varied significantly. Some played down the threat, while others reacted
promptly to impose costly lockdowns. Some leaders tended to neglect the value of scien-
tific judgements, while others followed scientific evidence from the very beginning of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus’ outbreak.
1Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
2Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK
*Consuelo Thiers is also affiliated to Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Barcelona, Spain
Corresponding author:
Consuelo Thiers, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) C/ de Ramon Trias Fargas, 25, 08005
Barcelona, Spain.
Email: cthiers@ibei.org
1159021BPI0010.1177/13691481231159021The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsThiers and Wehner
research-article2023
Special Issue Article
518 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25(3)
This pandemic has shown that leaders matter. However, the fast-growing literature on
political institutions and public policy regarding COVID-19 has focussed on the policy
capacity, institutional trust, historical legacy and cultural aspects, as well as different
national policy styles, and not much on the role of leaders as key drivers to explain the
variation in responses to the pandemic (Capano et al., 2020; Jennings et al., 2021; Toshkov
et al., 2021; Yan et al., 2021; Zahariadis et al., 2021). Studies that have engaged with lead-
ers focus on their educational backgrounds, communication styles and gender (Forster
and Heinzel, 2021; Green et al., 2020; Piscopo, 2020). In these different studies, leaders’
personal characteristics are not systematically explored as possible causes for this puz-
zling variation in national responses to the pandemic. This work is an initial step in that
direction by offering a complementary approach and perspective to the growing compara-
tive studies on diverging responses of governments to the COVID-19 crisis from the
angles of institutions, public policy and policy styles. Thus, this article offers a frame-
work to analyse leaders’ different types of behaviours and reactions to COVID-19, fol-
lowing the analytical benefits of Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) (Hermann, 2009).
The United Kingdom offers an ideal political context in which to carry out this study
under a most-similar system design. We focussed on two of the four UK nations to con-
duct the analysis, namely Scotland and England. This comparison has particular value
due to the potential effects that the different approaches to handling the health crisis can
have in paving the way for a second independence referendum in Scotland and, therefore,
the future of the union. These countries’ leaderships have markedly differed in their man-
aging of the COVID-19 crisis, despite very similar presenting circumstances. While
Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson initially downplayed the severity of the crisis,
First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon adopted a more cautious approach upon
SARS-CoV-2’s outbreak. Sturgeon made quicker decisions and put in place stricter meas-
ures to stop the spread of the virus compared with Johnson. In addition, Sturgeon reacted
strongly when her own advisors broke COVID-19 rules, whereas Johnson was more hesi-
tant to do the same with his own cabinet or advisors (Allegretti, 2020; Carrell, 2020). As
we will explain in-depth in the following sections, this speaks to three main differences
in these leaders’ styles: (1) risk-proneness versus risk-aversion; (2) flexibility and prag-
matism versus rigidity and hesitancy and (3) rule advocacy versus rule ambivalence.
Thus, this article aims at capturing the factors behind such a divergent set of responses
from these two leaders: Why, under similar circumstances, did leaders such as Sturgeon
and Johnson respond differently to the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the drivers of
their differing crisis-management styles?
Following the premises of LTA, we argue that the way Sturgeon and Johnson process
and respond to incoming information about the pandemic and their tendency to prioritise
tasks over relationships (or vice versa) can shed light on the diverging behaviours of these
two leaders. In other words, personality traits and the styles of leadership of both Sturgeon
and Johnson are expected to have shaped their respective governments’ responses to the
COVID-19 crisis. Our research covers the initial response to the crisis: that is, the time
period between the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of the SARS-CoV-2
outbreak now being a pandemic in March 2020 to the announcement of the approval for
the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine in the United Kingdom in December of the same year.
Within this timeframe, we focus on three phases of the Covid-19 crisis in the United
Kingdom: the lockdown, exit strategy and second wave.
The following section provides an overview of the political situation in the United
Kingdom, pointing out the differences observed in the handling of the crisis by Scotland
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