The missing link: Studying political leadership from the followers’ perspective
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211056227 |
| Author | Rudolf Metz |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211056227
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(3) 437 –452
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211056227
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
The missing link: Studying
political leadership from the
followers’ perspective
Rudolf Metz
Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary
Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
Recent political developments suggest that political followership has played increasingly vital roles
in modern democratic politics. However, scholarship seemingly lacks proper conceptual and
methodological tools for analysing why and how citizens follow their leaders, and what the role
of this relationship is in personalised politics and political leadership. Addressing the research gap,
this article turns to generic leadership studies for help and introduces its follower-centric models
into the field of political science. This venture opens with a review and comparison of some of
the different perspectives about political followers in the scholarship on political leadership and
personalisation, taking account of their limitations. It then moves on to assess follower-centric
models and their empirical results, focusing on observers’ perceptions about the characteristics
and behaviours of leaders in the attribution of leadership. Based on these models, the article offers
a balanced perspective about leader–follower relations. Recommendations for future research
directions are presented in the concluding sections.
Keywords
follower-centric leadership models, followers, followership, personalisation, political leadership
Received: 6th June 2021; Revised version received: 17th August 2021; Accepted: 28th September 2021
One cannot have leaders without followers, but going further, one cannot understand
leadership without understanding followership.
– Fiorina and Shepsle (1989: 36; italics in the original)
In recent years, the call for more follower-centric research has constantly grown louder
among students of political leadership (Blondel, 2014: 711–712; Hartley, 2018: 209–210;
Kellerman, 2008; Metz, 2021) and personalisation (Garzia, 2011), in line with the
strengthening trend in the generic leadership literature (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). Within this
scholarship, leadership researchers describe leadership as a social construct induced by
Corresponding author:
Rudolf Metz, Institute for Political Science, Centre for Social Sciences, Tóth Kálmán utca 4, 1097 Budapest,
Hungary.
Email: metz.rudolf@tk.hu
1056227POL0010.1177/02633957211056227PoliticsMetz
research-article2021
Article
438 Politics 44(3)
followers’ cognitive, attribution, and identification processes. This subjectivist approach
does not preclude analysing the leader–follower relationship through scientific methods.
Moreover, it offers standardised and reliable measurement tools that political scientists
can use to understand the role of followers and followership in personalised politics. The
article addresses this research gap by introducing follower-centric models of generic
leadership studies (Shamir, 2009) into the field of political science.
The growing interest of political scientists in this area is not surprising. Current events,
such as the electoral victory and defeat of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum and
subsequent British parliamentary elections, and the rise of and reactions to populist politi-
cians, show that politics has become a more hectic activity in modern democracies. Fierce
and antagonistic emotions are reflected primarily in the transformation of citizens’ rela-
tionships with their leaders. Public trust in the political elite has vanished or become more
volatile; citizens have become more cynical and critical of political leadership; and the
‘cult of strong leaders’ has also strengthened (Foa and Mounk, 2016). Moreover, people
formulate often contradictory (Medvic, 2013) or unrealistic expectations (Flinders, 2012)
towards leaders, and their perceptions of leadership achievements are also biased by
social and political ties (Achen and Bartels, 2016; Flinders, 2012). Although these ten-
dencies draw attention to the importance of political followership and leader–follower
relations, political science struggles to interpret – and so generally ignores – these
dynamics.
In this regard, the diagnosis formulated by James McGregor Burns (1978: 3) still
seems to be valid: namely that understanding the process of political leadership and lead-
ership relationships is made overly difficult by two biases: ‘normativism’ and ‘leader-
centrism’. Mainstream political science generally concentrates on public opinion, voters,
and citizens, or on collective actors (political parties or movements and representative
institutions). Implicitly or explicitly, these studies share an anti-elitist belief that leaders
act as citizens’ obedient agents, which limits the role of leadership. Due to this normative
bias, the term ‘follower’ or ‘followership’ is associated with negative and passive con-
notations when compared with ideas like ‘voters’, ‘voting’, ‘citizens’, and ‘citizenship’,
which prescribe active political participation (Barber, 2000). However, the literature on
personalisation has recognised that attitudes towards leaders can potentially influence
voting behaviour (leader effects: Garzia, 2011; Lobo, 2014), inflate job approval ratings
(Greene, 2001; Newman, 2003), and affect the formation of policy preferences (leader
cue: Agadjanian, 2020; Lenz, 2012). Despite this, scientific interest and empirical research
on this topic still lags far behind that dedicated to parties, policy issues, and ideologies
(cf. Garzia, 2011; Lobo, 2014).
The opposite pole of political science also falls short of satisfying this research inter-
est. Political leadership studies recognised that leadership is more complex than the over-
romanticised idea of strong leaders (Brown, 2014) accepting the dark side (Helms, 2012)
and collective (Campus et al., 2021) and distributed forms of political leadership (Elgie,
2011; Kane et al., 2009). Still, researchers are determined strongly by leader-centrism,
and as Burns (1978: 1) stated, ‘[i]f we know all too much about our leaders, we know far
too little about leadership’ (italics in the original). They have overemphasised the role of
formal power-holders and their traits and institutional and political resources in the lead-
ership process (e.g. Bennister et al., 2017; Elgie, 1995; Helms, 2005) giving limited and
insignificant role for followers.
In fact, beyond the commonplace that there is no leadership without followership, fol-
lowers play a critical role in politics. Generally speaking, followership refers to the
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