Political leadership as statecraft? Aligning theory with praxis in conversation with British party leaders
| Author | Toby S James |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118778961 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
research-article2018
Original Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Political leadership as
2018, Vol. 20(3) 555 –572
© The Author(s) 2018
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statecraft? Aligning theory
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118778961
DOI: 10.1177/1369148118778961
with praxis in conversation
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
with British party leaders
Toby S James
Abstract
How should prime ministerial and party leadership be understood and assessed? One leading
approach posits that we should assess them in terms of whether they achieve statecraft, that is,
winning and maintain office in government. This article supplements and then assesses that theory
by drawing from Pawson and Tilley’s concept of the realistic interview, in which practitioners are
deployed as co-researchers to assess and revise theory. Unprecedented interviews with British
party leaders were therefore undertaken. The article provides new empirical support for the
framework because many of the key generative mechanisms identified within the neo-statecraft
model were present in an analysis of the interviews. The interviews also allowed the limitations
of the model to be demarcated. Statecraft focuses purely on cunning leadership where the aim is
to maximise power and influence. This approach differs from leadership by conscience where the
aim is to achieve normative goals.
Keywords
British politics, critical realism, elite interviewing, elite theory, neo-statecraft, political leaders,
political leadership, statecraft
Introduction
The study of political leadership has recently become re-established as the focus of sys-
tematic academic attention within political science, after years of neglect. Writings on the
significance of political leaders may date back to Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine,
Erasmus and Machiavelli (Kane and Patapan, 2014: 3), but it was widely recognised to
have been given disproportionately little prominence in the study of politics and
overviews of the discipline (Foley, 2013: 7–9). Writing in 1987, Jean Blondel (1987: 1)
remarked that it was ‘prima facie surprising that a general analysis of [political leader-
ship] … should be so little advanced’.
School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Corresponding author:
Toby S James, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia,
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: t.s.james@uea.ac.uk
556
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20(3)
Fast-forward 30 years and a new range of conceptual frameworks have evolved to under-
stand political leadership (Bennister et al., 2015; Elgie, 1995; Helms, 2012; Kane and
Patapan, 2014; Rhodes and Hart, 2014; Strangio et al., 2013). A prominent debate within
this scholarship has developed about how prime ministerial and party leadership should be
understood and assessed (Bennister et al., 2015; Buller and James, 2012; Byrne et al., 2017;
Greenstein, 2009; Heppell, 2014; Royal Holloway Group PR3710, 2015; Theakston, 2011;
Theakston and Gill, 2006, 2011). One leading framework for assessing political leaders is
the neo-statecraft approach (James, 2016). Built on foundations laid by Jim Bulpitt (1986),
this approach argued that leaders should be assessed in terms of whether they win office and
achieve a sense of governing competence. Yet it has been criticised for, among other things,
rarely being subjected to empirical knowledge and being untestable.
Pawson and Tilley (1997) have developed methods from within critical realism to evalu-
ate theory, however. This article uses their concept of the realistic interview to assess neo-
statecraft theory by asking political leaders themselves to reflect on neo-statecraft theory.
Unprecedented, original interviews with former British party leaders were undertaken in
which they were employed as ‘co-researchers’, asking them to evaluate the framework. The
argument of this article is that the interviews provide support for assessing leaders in state-
craft terms because it is sensitive to the key structural dilemma that leaders face: winning
office is a pre-requisite to making social change. This and other causal mechanisms at the
heart of the theory were supported in the interviews. However, interviewees also provided
some causes for criticism of the model because other generative mechanisms were found to
be motivating leaders that neo-statecraft theory did not directly acknowledge. In short, a
leader’s broader public and social value is not recognised. Statecraft is therefore argued to
be useful for assessing one type of leadership. It focuses purely on cunning leadership
where the aim is to maximise power and influence. This type differs from conscience lead-
ership where the aim is to achieve normative goals. The complete leader, however, will need
to achieve power by cunning and conscience leadership, and for that reason, neo-statecraft
theory is useful. The article therefore seeks to make an original contribution by testing and
revising a prominent theory for understanding political leadership of relevance for all par-
liamentary democracies. New evidence is provided in support of the model, and a matrix for
the challenges that leaders face is identified. However, the limits of the model are more
demarcated. More widely, it contributes a new approach to how elite theories based on criti-
cal realism can be subjected to empirical knowledge using interviews with a rare application
and adaption of Pawson and Tilley’s work.
The article begins by describing how neo-statecraft came to be used to understand
political leadership and assess leaders in parliamentary democracies. It then discusses
the challenges involved in assessing critical realist theory and outlines Pawson and
Tilley’s approach and explains why their concept of the realistic interview could be
used in the study of elites. The methods used are then explained in more detail. The
‘Results and analysis’ section outlines the themes that emerged from the interviews,
before the article discusses whether these are evidence in support of the statecraft
thesis or counter to it.
Political leadership as statecraft
Neo-statecraft theory began from the work of Jim Bulpitt. His famous Statecraft thesis
was first stated in 1986 as a contribution to a debate on Margaret Thatcher and
‘Thatcherism’ (Bulpitt, 1986). Bulpitt argued that Margaret Thatcher was a politician
James
557
driven by political expediency, making short-term tactical moves to win elections rather
than a leader driven by an ideological raison d’etre. In more general terms, he argued,
political leaders are primarily interested in statecraft: ‘the art of winning elections and
achieving some necessary degree of governing competence in office’ (Bulpitt, 1986: 21).
Bulpitt therefore conceptualised party leaders as being self-interested, rational and cohe-
sive actors. They will seek to achieve this through the use of ‘governing codes’ which are
a ‘set of relatively coherent principles or rules underlying policies and policy related
behaviour’ (Bulpitt, 1996: 1097) and ‘a set of political support mechanisms designed to
protect and promote the code and objectives’ (Bulpitt 1996: 1097). Bulpitt’s (1986: 22)
original support mechanisms were party management, a winning electoral strategy, politi-
cal argument hegemony and, most importantly, governing competence. Leaders operated
within a structural context that Bulpitt (1988: 185) called a ‘natural rate of governability’,
which affected their ability to achieve successful statecraft.
The statecraft approach has been commended as a useful method for assessing politi-
cal leaders (Buller and James, 2012). One advantage was that it allowed taking the key
structural constraint that leaders faced, the need to keep winning elections, into consid-
eration when we assess political leaders. In the winner-takes-all environment of British
politics, there are no prizes for second place. As Bulpitt (1988: 185) expressed himself,
‘Party leaders must … aim to win general elections simply because the consequences of
defeat … are so awful’. Moreover, according to Bulpitt (1996: 225):
[T]hese structural characteristics of modern British politics have produced party elites with
common, initial, subsistence-level objectives, namely winning national office, avoiding too
many problems while there and getting re-elected.
A second advantage of the approach is that it treats leadership as a collective exercise
(Buller and James 2012: 538–539). Executive decision-making is never collegial, and
rarely will an individual leader be responsible for the leadership of a government. There
will be a small number of senior ministers or advisors who will form a clique and act as a
unitary actor over time. Bulpitt’s (1995: 518) focus was therefore on the ‘Court’ (a term
used to refer to the ‘the formal Chief Executive plus his/her political friends and
advisors’).
Bulpitt’s original statecraft approach has been subject to criticism. First, the body of
work that he wrote was light, often unpublished and sometimes contradictory, claimed
Rhodes and Tiernan (2013), arguing that he was ‘no system builder’. Second, Griffiths
(2016: 738) has argued that statecraft theory reduces ideology and values to...
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