Anna Persson

Responsive and Responsible Leaders: A Matter of Political Will?

Policy makers and policy-oriented scholars concerned with development and reform commonly appeal to “political will” as a cornerstone of development. We question the circular and voluntaristic view of leadership behavior inherent in such an approach, and argue that—to be more useful for the analysis of development outcomes, as well as for policy design—the discourse on political will should be firmly integrated into a more systematic framework of analysis. In particular, we suggest that it should engage in more active dialogue with the combined insights offered by principal-agent theory and what we refer to as state theory. More specifically, in the framework we develop, the principal-agent framework offers the analytical tools for analyzing leadership behavior at the micro level, while state theory provides crucial insights regarding the macro-level factors shaping leadership behavior. In the end, these two perspectives in tandem have the potential to significantly increase our understanding of empirically observed leadership behavior as well as our theoretical understanding of how the context—and especially the character of underlying social contracts—shapes and constrains “political will.”

The Political and Historical Origins of Good Government: How Social Contracts Shape Elite Behavior

An influential scholarship holds that the behavior of political elites – that is, elected and non-elected public officials – is of key importance for achieving quality of government (Klitgaard, 1988; Goldsmith, 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006, 2012; North, Wallis, and Weingast, 2009; Fukuyama, 2011). The influence of political elites is assumed to travel through direct as well as indirect channels. The powerful position of elites gives them a direct influence on political, social, and economic development. At the same time, the behavior of political elites is likely to indirectly influence the behavior of ordinary citizens through what Werner (1983, p. 149) calls a “leader-follower spillover effect.” That is, the morals and actions of political elites are likely to be copied, complemented, and reinforced by actors further down the hierarchy. In line with this logic, it is often argued that “the fish rots from the head down,” whereas responsive and responsible leadership plays an important role in setting in motion a virtuous development spiral (Rothstein, 2011).