What do Britons Want in a Political Leader?
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058241305470 |
| Author | Tim Bale,Paul Webb,Stavroula Chrona |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
4POLITICAL INSIGHT•DECEMBER 2024
In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice,
Potter Stewart, famously gave his
opinion in a case that revolved in
part around what did and did not
constitute hard core pornography. ‘I shall
not’, he wrote, ‘today attempt further to
define the kinds of material I understand
to be embraced within that shorthand
description; and perhaps I could never
succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know
it when I see it’.
As for pornography, so for leadership. We all
think we know what it is, yet we nd it hard to
come up with a universally-agreed denition
– mainly because our conceptions of what
constitutes it are very often subjective and,
indeed, contextual. Many British voters, for
instance, lionised Winston Churchill as a
war leader, but famously decided after the
conict ended in 1945 that he was not the
man to ‘win the peace’.
Leadership is a crucial part of politics. But what do political party
members look for in a leader? And does this differ from the general
public? Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona report on new
research into leadership, and its darker side.
Understanding leadership
Our understanding of what constitutes a
good and bad leader is also cultural and
even, perhaps, psychological – something
that recent research on Britain’s party
members certainly seems to suggest.
The Party Members Project based out of
Queen Mary University of London and Sussex
University has been surveying the members
of ve political parties since 2015. We did so
again just after the 4 July General Election.
Having explored extensively both the
sociology and ideology of party members, we
decided this time to focus on the psychology
of membership. And as part of that eort, we
included in the survey (one we also elded
to the general public as well as members)
What do Britons Want
in a Political Leader?
© Sipa US / Alamy Stock Photo
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