Leadership in democracy : from adaptive response to entrepreneurial initiative / Paul Brooker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brooker, Paul.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1883-1950.

Schumpeter, Joseph A.

Political leadership.

Democracy.

Physical Description:

viii, 217 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Summary:

Leadership in Democracy develops and applies an innovative leadership theory of democracy and political evolution, based upon Schumpeter's famous theories of democracy and economic entrepreneurship. The first part of the book develops a Schumpeterian theory of democracy that views leadership as an essential component of democracy and its evolutionary political processes. Leadership in democracy normally involves only an adaptive, incremental response to change but it can also take the form of an adaptive innovation, a creative response, or a pioneering leader's entrepreneurial-style initiative and innovation. In the second part of the book this theory is applied to the US and British democracies in an assessment of how much entrepreneurial-style, pioneering leadership occurred during the 1960s-1990s in the electoral, governmental, legislative, administrative and policy-advocacy sectors of democracies. The assessment leads on to a wide-ranging appraisal of the prospects for 'entrepreneurial' democracy in the twenty-first century.

Contents:

Part I Theory 7

1 Schumpeter's Leadership Model of Democracy 9

The quasi-economic aspect of his theory of democracy 9

The leadership dimension of his theory 11

Competition for leadership between elections 16

Restraining the leader: competition within government 19

2 Pioneering and Adaptive Leadership 22

Economic and political (pioneering) leadership 22

Entrepreneurship and its political equivalent 24

Adaptive leadership versus entrepreneurial-style pioneering 29

3 From Economic to Political Evolution 34

Entrepreneurs and capitalist evolution 34

Political evolution and historical selection 36

Political development and evolution 39

Path dependency, rigidity and the need for pioneering leadership 43

4 Pioneering Leadership as Political Entrepreneurship 51

Theorists of political entrepreneurship - or business? 52

A question of motive 58

5 The Leadership-Evolutionary Model 61

Developing the leadership-evolutionary model 61

The LE model of the democratic political system 68

Imperfect competition and entrepreneurial democracy 74

Assessing the prevalence of pioneering leadership in the 1960s-90s 78

Part II Assessing Entrepreneurial-Style, Pioneering Leadership 81

6 Electoral Pioneering 83

Parties as innovative electoral tools 83

Looking for innovative election issues 85

The life cycle of issues 90

Ways of issue innovating: (1) heresthetical and (2) reframing 92

7 Governmental (Executive) Pioneering 95

The British Prime Minister as potential pioneer 96

Looking for pioneering PMs: Margaret Thatcher 102

Looking for pioneering PMs: Tony Blair 111

8 Legislative Pioneering 117

A congress of individuals 117

Selling bills: introducing/promoting legislation 119

Careerist leadership in Congress 121

Pioneering leadership in Congress 125

9 Administrative Pioneering 128

The entrepreneurial-like administrative leader 128

Very public and autonomous pioneering administrators 130

Checking out pioneering credentials 136

Assessing the prevalence of administrative pioneering 141

10 Policy Advocates' Pioneering 146

Policy (advocate) entrepreneurs in action 147

Nader and others 149

Assessing their fate: punctuated equilibrium 153

Conclusion - Two Future Scenarios 159

A pessimistic scenario 160

An optimistic scenario 163

Appendix Schumpeter on Development (Evolution) 167.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-209) and index.

ISBN:

140399403X

OCLC:

60513241

Publisher Number:

9781403994035