Suchergebnisse

Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After integrating theoretical and empirical findings on crisis management and political leadership styles, we illustrate our heuristic by applying it to the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005. We conclude by offering suggestions for further research on the underdeveloped subject of the blame management challenges faced by political leaders in the wake of acute crisis episodes.

Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After integrating theoretical and empirical findings on crisis management and political leadership styles, we illustrate our heuristic by applying it to the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005. We conclude by offering suggestions for further research on the underdeveloped subject of the blame management challenges faced by political leaders in the wake of acute crisis episodes.

This introductory chapter sets out the conceptual and methodological rationale for the book. The chapter reviews the field and places this new approach within the context of current leadership research. The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) builds on advances in understanding of how to track and assess political leadership. It offers the concept of "leadership capital," as an aggregate of authority that reaches across the traditional divide between structure and agency through a flexible analytical tool. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. The chapter sets out how this tool is utilized in the examination of the eleven-country case studies to better understand and explain the "puzzles" of contemporary political leadership.