Political Science

Political science is the study of the institutions, people, ideas, and processes of government and the public uses of power directed toward collective goals. The study of leadership is both old and new to political science. The study of leadership is as old as the Greek philosopher Socrates addressing a crowd in the marketplace on the meaning of justice or the Greek philosopher Plato asking people to consider the efficacy of the “Philosopher King” in his dialogue Republic. The study of leadership can be seen in the Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's advice to a prospective sponsor in his book The Prince or the Dutch scholar Erasmus's countering of Machiavelli's worldly concern on the accumulation and use of power with a moralistic concern for leadership in The Education of the Christian Prince.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the centrality of leadership to the study and exercise of political power, the political science of today does not devote itself to the study of leadership as much as one might expect. The primary journal of the discipline, The American Political Science Review, has published only forty-two articles (less than 1 percent of its [Page 1207]4,856 articles published) on leadership since it began publishing in 1906.

Political scientist Betty Glad argues that the discipline's neglect of leadership as a topic of inquiry stems from a desire “to find general laws of political behavior that are not time bound” (Valenty & Feldman 2002, 10). Thus, political scientists are more concerned with institutional structure and patterns that lead to theory building. The study of individual leaders is seen as too idiosyncratic and less significant than other forces. Better to be less comprehensive and more theoretical; better to reduce political reality to a few manageable variables—the better to build theories with—than to account for everything; better to capture the essence than the entirety. The discipline should, in Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe's words, “move toward a methodology that values simplicity and parsimony rather than complexity and comprehensiveness” (Moe 1993, 388). All of this activity is directed toward building a theory of politics. Glad notes that

There is, then, a controversy over how (or even whether) to study leadership in political science, with those who stress the “hard” science side of the discipline dismissing the study of individual leaders or leadership in general as being not sufficiently scientific to be legitimate, but others seeing the study of leaders and leadership as indispensable for an understanding of how political systems operate.

Political scientists use a variety of methods to study leadership. From the more traditional methods such as philosophy, ethics, biography, history, and constitutional and institutional studies to more “scientific” methods, political scientists have no one agreed-upon “best” way to study leadership.

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