The Oxford handbook of political leadership / edited by R.A.W. Rhodes and Paul 't Hart.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Puzzles of political leadership / R.A.W. Rhodes and Paul 't Hart -- Western political thought / Nannerl O. Keohane -- Theory of democratic leadership / Frank Hendriks and Niels Karsten -- Confucianism / Joseph Chan and Elton Chan -- Feminism / Laura Sjobert -- Political science / David S. Bell -- Public administration / R.A.W. Rhodes -- Political psychology / Margaret G. Hermann -- Psychoanalytic theories / Stanley A. Renshon -- Social psychology / Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Michael J. Platow -- Rational choice approaches to leadership / Geoffrey Brennan and Michael Brooks -- Anthropology / Cris Shore -- Institutional analysis / Ludger Helms -- Contextual analysis / Paul 't Hart -- Decision analysis / David Brulé, Alex Mintz, and karl DeRouen Jr. -- Social-constructionist analysis / Keith Grint -- Rhetorical and performative analysis / John Uhr -- Experimental analysis / Rose McDermott -- Observational analysis / Francesca Gains -- At-a-distance analysis / Mark Schafer -- Biographical analysis / James Walter -- Personality profiling analysis / Jerrold M. Post -- Civil leadership / Richard A. Couto -- Party and electoral leadership / Marina Costa Lobo -- Populism and political leadership / Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser -- Performative political leadership / John Gaffney -- Political leadership in networks / Eric-Hans Jlijn -- Political leadership in times of crisis / Chris Ansell, Arjen Boin, and Paul 't Hart -- Leadership and the American presidency / David McKay -- Presidential communication from hustings to Twitter / Jeffrey E. Cohen -- Executive leadership in semi-presidential systems / Robert Elgie -- The variability of prime ministers / Patrick Weller -- The contingencies of prime-ministerial power in the UK / Andrew Blick and George Jones -- Prime ministers and their advisers in parliamentary democracies / Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw -- Cabinet ministers : leaders, team players, followers? / Rudy B. Andeweg --Local political leaders / Colin Copus and Steve Leach -- Local political leadership / John Wanna -- Leadership and international cooperation / Charles F. Parker and Christer Karlsson -- Leadership of international organizations / Bob Reinalda and Bertjan Verbeek -- Political leadership in China / Bo Zhiyue -- Latin American leadership / Harvey F. Kline -- Post-communist leadership / Leslie Holmes -- African political leadership / Gerrie Swart, Jo-Ansie van Wyk, and Maryke Botha -- Can political leadership be taught? / Jean Hartley -- Does gender matter? / Patricia Lee Sykes -- What have we learned? / Jean Blondel.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed-spun-as the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

Political leadership has returned to the forefront of research in political science in recent years, after several years of neglect. This handbook provides a broad-ranging and cohesive examination of the study of political leadership.