essay on political leader

How to Write an Essay about a Political Leader

The simplest political systems are found in tribes. Tribal societies do not seem to have political leaders in the sense that we expect to see in the 21 century. But still, political power is peculiar either to ancient or modern times. It is represented by such outstanding political leaders as Julius Caesar, King Arthur, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth II, Barack Obama and many others who have taken up the duty to govern a tribe, city, state, region or even an entire nation.

And now, you need to write an essay about a political leader, for example, who inspires you or who you consider as the most powerful in the world. Do we guess right? So if you are here now, it is true. And we’re ready to help with writing this particular essay – what to include and in what order. Let’s find out together!

Table of Contents

Political Leadership over the Early Years

Our modern civilization is indebted to the people of ancient Greece and Rome. Know why? Despite the fact that these societies made considerable contributions to the fields like art, literature, philosophy , the greatest gift to future generations was the modern perception of government. Today’s idea of democracy is grounded by the political struggles in the city of Athens. Know that the citizens of Athens managed to have equal political rights, freedom of speech, and the opportunity to participate directly in the political arena in the 5th to 4th century BCE? And now, you can use this fact in your essay speaking about the Athenian democracy .

In The Roman Republic , different forms of governance started appearing – from monarchies and oligarchies to militaristic societies and proto-democracies. This way, a republic as a new form of government has been copied by many countries for centuries – Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Dutch Republic, Swiss Confederation, Cuba, Republic of China, Russian Republic, etc. For example, the government of the USA is based partly on Rome’s model. Most are sure that America now looks like Rome before the fall of the Republic .

All that information means that there was a necessity to have a leader to govern. Aristotle describes the role of politics and the political community in his book, Politics . In his opinion, politics is supposed to bring about the virtuous life in the citizenry . Additionally, it is better to get familiar with this work of political philosophy in more detail. Today, views on political leadership are ambiguous than ever. On the one hand, two world wars put a deep mistrust of political leaders. On the other hand, the complexity of modern society causes a demand for effective political leaders. Let’s describe them below.

Who Are They, These Political Leaders, Today?

When thinking about people in the position of political power, one tends to think of them as representatives of some other breed of human beings. After all, they’ve managed to rise so high and keep their positions, they have to deal with unimaginable problems on a daily basis, they decide the fate of millions of people and, by extension, of the world in general. Surely they cannot be the same as common men, right? Yes and no.

On the one hand, contrary to popular belief, political leaders aren’t necessarily more intelligent than the majority of so-called ‘common men’ – or rather, they possess some other kind of intelligence, different from what is conventionally meant by this word. This intelligence helps them rise up high, intuitively understand how to deal with people and prevail over opposition; it doesn’t necessarily help them in dealing with any other problems.

Come to think of it, it is hard to understand where people get the idea that personalities in the positions of power are in any way special and better suited to making important decisions. Anybody with at least a passing acquaintance with history and awareness of current events sees that typical political leaders regularly make decisions that are nothing short of idiotic – not in hindsight, but right from the get-go. The only thing one needs to be a successful politician is to be likable. And in order to be likable, one doesn’t have to possess either knowledge or intelligence. In fact, history knows many political leaders who were able to inspire loyalty and sympathy while being complete ciphers as individuals.

What we all should understand is that a typical and even a good political leader isn’t the same as a good human being. In fact, to believe that a politician you back is a good person is almost morbidly optimistic as history tells us quite explicitly: percentage of decent human beings in politics, irrespectively of a nation, epoch, and system of government is infinitesimally negligible, with the chance of one getting into a position of true power being even less probable.

There is no such thing as good or bad political leaders. There are only those that are bad and those that are even worse. Therefore, the choice between different political leaders is not a choice between good or evil, right or wrong – it is the choice between a greater and a lesser evil. It is exactly what we all should understand when dealing with different people promoting different agendas. A typical politician cannot be trusted by definition – politics is an art of influencing people , and one cannot influence people being good and honest all the time.

Of course, all political leaders want us to perceive them as honest, compassionate and consistent people whose only goal in life is to help us improve our lives. Reality is, of course, different. A typical political leader pursues his or her own goals; an atypical leader is very unlikely to rise high enough to matter.

5 Essay Writing Steps

Now, you know what to write about in the essay “Political Leaders”. It is time to know how to write an essay on the same topic step by step.

• Prepare an outline of your ideas on the topic. Your thoughts must be well-organized in an essay. An outline allows to do it. Don’t rush into writing an essay immediately after sitting at a desk. List all your main ideas leaving space under each one so that you will be able to add some subpoints.
• Write a thesis statement. After you collect all the ideas for an essay, proceed with writing the main idea of your essay. Usually, a thesis statement has two parts – the topic itself and the main point of the essay. For instance, imagine you are writing about George Washington and his impact on the United States. Your thesis statement will lool, “George Washington has influenced the future of our country while being the first American president.”
• Develop the body of your essay. If you think we are wrong providing this tip after creating a thesis statement, be sure it is an effective step to write an essay. When the main part of your essay is prepared, it is much easier to come up with the logically complete introduction and conclusion. Reveal all the main points in the body with all the relevant subpoint, details and examples.
• Introduce the topic of your essay briefly. Based on the written thesis statement, you can broaden the first part of the essay – an introduction. Just add several sentences and voila you are coming to the end of writing.
• Conclude the essay logically. After your essay consists of the introduction and body, something is missed. This part is called ‘conclusion’ where you sum up all the above mentioned in a logical way – what is presented and why.

Hopefully, the writing process in the essay “A Political Leader” is simplified by our step-by-step guide. If no, you are welcome to our service where you’ll find an experienced writer of any essay you are struggling with now or have no time to struggle with.

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23 Civic Leadership

Richard A. Couto is with Union Institute and University and a founding faculty member of the Antioch University PhD Program in Leadership and Change. Prior to that he was a founding faculty member of the Jepson School at the University of Richmond, where he held the George M. and Virginia B. Modlin Chair in Leadership Studies, 1991–2002. His recent books include: Political and Civic Leadership: A Reference Handbook (Sage 2010); and (with James MacGregor Burns), Reflections on Leadership (University of America Press 2007). His work has won numerous national awards, including best book in transformational politics from the American Political Science Association, and the Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Prize of the Independent Sector.

• Published: 13 January 2014
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This chapter distinguishes between government, economy, and the third sector to locate the space for a civic leadership that can promote social change. The chapter separates leadership from formal positions of authority. This simple decoupling has profound implications. It extends politics beyond the realm of government, and challenges fundamental assumptions about leadership, including intentions, the nature of power and authority, and followership. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for the study of civic leadership.

1 Introduction

Civic leadership challenges the conceptual boundaries that we set for politics and leadership. It extends politics beyond the realm of government and leadership beyond positional authority. Civic leadership may also challenge the practice of ordinary politics that often ignores the inconvenient truths of social, economic, and political conditions. To thrive effectively, civic leadership requires civil society to be a space autonomous from the economic and political realms. This chapter examines some of the bedrock assumptions about political leadership; the nature of civil society and civic leadership; and some of the anomalies that civic leadership presents for our paradigms about politics and leadership. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for the study of civic leadership.

2 Politics, Leadership, and Leaders

For most of human history, politics and leadership were one and the same subject. Notable thinkers, in different times and contexts, concerned themselves with public purpose and its corollaries of processes and leadership to achieve it ( Strauss and Cropsey 1987 ). Even the myths of oral tradition ( Flowers 2010 ) asked the primary questions of politics: where does the authority of political leaders come from? For what purposes are political leaders entrusted with authority and power? Who may hold them accountable to those purposes? Unfortunately, for most of this time our thoughts about leadership also had a leader-centric focus on the desired or observed characteristics or styles of people with positional authority. From Plato and Confucius to the present day, our notions of political leadership have imbibed the leader-centric tradition of much of political philosophy and the current paradigms of leadership studies. Despite dramatic democratic revolutions over the past several centuries, which have redefined the nature of authority and invested it in new forms of participation and legitimation, the largest part of the study of politics and leadership still identifies leadership with leaders—that is, people in positions of authority and formal power.

To examine civic leadership is to invite a departure from those traditional approaches to political leadership and a shift in attention to leadership as an action, not a position; that is, specifically taking initiative on behalf of shared values and common benefit. We expect our leaders with formal roles of authority to lead—that is, to take that initiative. The frequent call for leadership clearly entails a request for action because leadership is more than a title or position. Moreover, this definition of leadership implies that everyone, regardless of position, can be a leader by taking initiative on behalf of shared values and common benefit. Robert Tucker (1981) , a political scientist, makes this distinction as one of constituted and non-constituted leadership. Ronald Heifetz (1994) built on Tucker to distinguish between authority and leadership and measured the latter in terms of the mobilization of a group’s resources to meet challenges to its well-being within its environment. Civic leadership involves leadership as an action and not a position. It includes the actions of ordinary people without positions of power and authority, such as the legendary Dutch boy who plugged the leak in the dike that protected his city. To explore civic leadership as leading without formal political authority, we need to explore the realm where we find it—civil society.

3 Civil Society and Civic Leadership

John Ehrenberg distills civil society’s changing forms and conceptualizations over time and finds that ‘civil society delineates a sphere that is formally distinct from the body politic and state authority on the one hand, and from the immediate pursuit of self-interest and the imperatives of the market on the other’ ( Ehrenberg 1999 : 235). In the 2000s, civil society is often equated with another space distinct from government and business, appropriately termed the ‘third sector’ ( Salamon et al. 2004 ). Figure 23.1 presents these three distinct sectors.

Unfortunately, as is often the practice, Figure 23.1 conflates disparate parts of the third sector with civil society. We offer business executives—for example Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and billionaire—accolades for their philanthropy; for their participation on boards of third-sector organizations that address a community problem or need; or for their promotion of the arts, cancer research, or some other worthwhile cause. Voluntary associations within the third sector, also called non-profit organizations or non-governmental organizations, provide civic leadership through the cultural events, human services, and other vital and valuable programmes they conduct for the general benefit of the community. Local public officials may be praised for their civic-mindedness when they support the non-governmental organizations of the third sector in their efforts for some community improvement. These all touch upon the vital centre of civil society but do not express its core.

Civil society as the third sector

This conflation of civil society with the third sector ignores the political differences within the third sector and thus obscures a more precise meaning of civil society ( Edwards 2011 : 83). For example, some environmental groups in the third sector, such as Greenpeace, are more deliberate and intentional in their political purpose than other environmental groups, such as bird-watching clubs. In addition, normative or even utopian aspirations for a world in which more people have greater opportunities for complete human development are part of the space of civil society.

Among ameliorative voluntary associations, some protect and nourish happiness or attempt to extend its opportunities as a matter of charity or voluntary individual and social responsibility and thus reflect the differences of wealth and opportunity within society. Others seek to do so as a matter of justice ( Rawls 1971 ; Freire 1993 : 27; Sen 1999 ; Nussbaum 2000 ) and thus highlight the differences of wealth and opportunity within society. Saul Alinsky, an iconic US community organizer, is alleged to have said that his role was ‘to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’, but, in practice, the voluntary associations within civil society may comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable in varying degrees. Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian archbishop and pioneer of liberation theology, portrayed a balancing act between running voluntary associations and exercising civil-society leadership, when he observed that when he gave food to the poor, people called him a saint, but when he asked why they were poor, they called him a Communist. Hillel Schmid contrasts an inclusive definition of civil society that embraces all groups of the third sector with a narrower definition that distinguishes service providers from advocacy and watchdog groups ( Schmid 2009 ). Just like the very earliest accounts of advocacy and monitoring groups, Schmid presents them as counterweights to government and gives less attention to their role vis-à-vis business and the collusion of business and government. Figure 23.2 portrays one model of civil society as the overlap of the government, business, and third sectors, but distinct from all of them. It suggests that the realm of government may overlap with business and the third sector and that business may overlap with government and the third sector. The model presents a balance among the sectors seldom achieved. Leadership within civil society pushes out and attempts to create or contain the appropriate boundaries of the first and second sectors, especially their overlap—where politics and civil society may be commodified by economics, or economics and civil society folded into the political sector within an authoritarian state.

Distinctions within the third sector and within civil society

This chapter takes the more specific view of civil society as the space within which people attempt to redress conditions, such as human needs and rights or environmental degradation, ignored or exacerbated by the ordinary practice of politics and economics. Kumi Naidoo, formerly secretary general of CIVICUS, a global alliance for citizen participation, and executive director of Greenpeace International, and his co-author Siddharth Bannerjee explain that the developing southern hemisphere especially has witnessed the development of more civil-society organizations, nationally and transnationally, as legitimate public actors to participate alongside state and market ‘in the making of public policies designed to resolve collective problems and advance the public good’ ( Naidoo and Bannerjee 2010 : 37).

Having distinguished between service and advocacy groups in the third sector, we must now attempt to distinguish between advocacy groups. We are dealing with the form of civil society that provides hope for social transformation for democratic ends and by participatory and inclusive processes ( Cohen 2010 ). We can find one statement of the transforming agenda of civil society in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Robert Putnam, drawing upon a Toquevillean emphasis on the efficacy and democratic nature of voluntary associations for mutual help ( Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti 1993 ; Putnam 2000 ), stressed only the salutary political nature of associational life, especially in the development of social capital ( Wood 2010 ). He, like Figure 23.2 and our discussion so far, ignores the civic leadership associations committed to upholding caste-like restrictions of inequality—uncivil society groups ( Bob 2011 ). These groups suggest the dark side of social capital that bonds similar groups without bridging them to other groups. In its most ideal forms, such as Martin Luther King’s ‘beloved community’, civil society leadership builds bridging bonds of social capital and explains that the lifting of caste restrictions liberates those upon whom they were applied and those who applied them ( Orwell 1936 ; King 1957 ; Freire 1993 : 27). Clearly, however, King encountered white supremacist groups, formal and informal associations, determined to resist changes in segregation and civil rights that also reside in civil society.

This brings us to one final distinction among advocacy groups. Some of them represent the realm of deliberative democracy in which principles—such as liberty, equality, accountability, and transparency—and decision-making processes—such as deliberation, bargaining, and negotiation among groups—assure that policies and decisions are justified to those who are bound by them. The values of deliberative democracy flow from reciprocal relationships in democratic politics—public spiritedness, mutual respect, and moral understanding ( Gutmann and Thompson 2010 : 326). The realm of deliberative democracy has an obvious relationship with the perspective of civil society that Naidoo and Bannerjee offered.

Some civil-society groups advocating social justice, however, may have to contend with other groups from all three sectors to achieve reciprocity and the capacity to participate in deliberative democracy. Thus, advocacy groups may employ tactics of contention to halt the ordinary processes of politics to have their claims against another group or sector taken seriously and thus accorded the respect that precedes deliberation. Thus, a labour union may conduct a strike. A racial, ethnic, or religious group may boycott merchants. Recent scholarship has brought these and other tactics such as social movements, protest, and revolution under the umbrella of contentious politics ( McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001 ; Tilly and Tarrow 2006 ).

Rather than being distinct realms, contentious politics and deliberative democracy complement each other within civil society—although the former deals explicitly with power and violence, a point to which we will return. For the moment, let us stress the common elements of these realms with advocacy in civil society. Betsy Leondar-Wright and William Gamson suggest that the distinctive leadership of social movements functions similarly to civil-society leadership, especially advocacy groups. It provides a collective action frame of political consciousness that supports participation in collective action. The three components of this frame, listed here in a rough order from less to more similarity between social movement and civil-society leadership, include an identity component that defines a group as we and a set of adversaries as they who have responsibility for an injustice; an injustice component that is a ‘hot cognition’, that is laden with emotion; and, particularly significant, an agency component:

The agency component (also known as empowerment or collective efficacy) refers to the belief that it is possible to change conditions or policies through collective action. Collective action frames deny the immutability of some undesirable situation and empower people by defining them as potential agents of their own history. They suggest not merely that something can be done but that we can do something. ( Leondar-Wright and Gamson 2010 : 350)

The space of civil society, which defines civic leadership, requires some degree of autonomy from government and economic actors; speaks to collective and individual interests and needs; contests the efforts of government or the economy to encroach the space of the other sectors; and brings people together individually and in associations to hidden or taken-for-granted spaces to envision and practise democratic forms of increased equality, representation, and participation in decision-making on public matters.

4 Civic Leadership

Working within this space, civic leadership regularly contends with existing assumptions about politics and leadership. As Dom Helder Camara (1971) pointed out, the question ‘Why?’, is the anthem of civil society and distinguishes it from other segments of the third sector. Of the ordinary assumptions of the political sector, the authoritative allocation of values or who gets what, when, and how ( Lasswell 1936 ; Easton 1953 ), it asks: why? This question broadens the definition of politics by raising the possibility that the legitimacy of authoritative political arrangement may itself be a social, political, and economic allocation and subject to examination and political change. The way in which civil leadership challenges the cognitive and cultural forms of power and legitimacy may appear to those in formal positions of authority, and with coercive power, as criminal sabotage. It may be for this reason that the most profound reflections on peaceful social transformation often involve jails ( Thoreau 1849 ; Dostoyevsky 1948 ; King 1963 ; Gandhi 1993 ; Gramsci 1998 ; Suu Kyi 1999 ). Similarly, the most iconic images of oppressive violence come from the repression of disruptive, but peaceful, dissent, such as the detention, torture, and execution of thousands of dissidents at the national soccer stadium ordered by Augusto Pinochet in 1973; the military repression of students in Tiananmen Square in 1989; and the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwi in Nigeria in 1995.

The study of civic leadership may be as contentious to the field of leadership studies as the practice of civic leadership is to politics, because it challenges three premisses of leadership:

Intentionality: is it leadership if someone’s action sets off consequences even if they were not deliberately intended?

Leadership without position and power: can we separate leadership from people with formal power of position and authority—and link it to the act of leading that anyone can undertake?

Followers: finally, are followers always essential to leadership, as we seem to think they are? Can we have leadership without them?

The examination of these challenges probes the nature of civic leadership and some of the challenges it presents to our assumptions about politics and leadership.

Intention, Causality, and Leadership

On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor—despondent that police had confiscated the produce he was trying to sell from his wheelbarrow and that his appeals for the return of his scales were ignored—acquired gasoline, poured it on himself, and set himself and much of the Arab world ablaze. In what has become known as the Arab spring, protests in his city started immediately, grew more intense with his death on 4 January 2011, and spilled over into other nations. Ten days after Bouazizi’s death, the president of Tunisia fled the country he had ruled for twenty-three years. Little less than a month later, the president of Egypt resigned. Eighteen days of citizen insurrection ended his thirty years in power. Despotic rulers in other countries yielded their power, were forced to do so, or resorted to the violent repression of protesters to fend off demands for their ouster. Bouazizi’s actions instigated a series of clearly dramatic events throughout the Arab world, but was it leadership?

James MacGregor Burns suggests that it was not. Burns sets as the litmus test of leadership, especially transforming political leadership, ‘the achievement of purpose in the form of real and intended social change’ ( Burns 1978 : 251; emphasis added). The real social change that he has in mind brings absolute values such as freedom, liberty, and justice closer to realization by reducing or removing political, economic, and social caste-like restrictions on a group. In a later work, Burns pointed to ‘the protection and nourishing of happiness, for extending the opportunity to pursue happiness to all people’, as the intentional agenda of transforming leadership ( Burns 2003 : 3). Although the Arab spring exemplifies this agenda of transforming leadership, there is little reason to believe that Bouazizi intended this consequence of his action.

Bouazizi voiced publicly, albeit tragically, what many others dared not say; his personal troubles were public issues ( Mills 1959 ). He did not so much lead others to make similar protests for similar reasons as much as he signalled their condition and catalysed their decision to find an alternative to despair with autocratic regimes and repressive conditions that stifled ordinary human aspirations and universally recognized human rights.

The same is true of other people who catalysed equally dramatic changes that were mostly unanticipated. For example, it is unlikely that Lech Walesa intended the dissolution of the Soviet Union when, in 1980, he scaled the fence at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk to join its striking workers. Similarly, in 1955 Rosa Parks may have had something in mind greater than maintaining her seat on the segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to move further towards the back of the bus. Her intentions, however, probably did not include bringing about a year-long bus boycott and decades of struggles for the civil rights of African-Americans and other Americans that would inspire people around the world to confront forms of subordination and injustice. Clearly, the consequence of their actions exceeded their intentions. Unless we discount their actions for the central role they played in subsequent events, they challenge the assumption that leadership is linked to intended change.

Recent leadership scholarship that borrows from complexity theory also challenges the causality of leadership. Mary Uhl-Bien and Russ Marion assert that no one person, even if he or she is an apparent major figure in making new possibilities apparently necessary, can completely understand or predict the outcome of his or her action. ‘Leaders [with and without authority] are not really in control’ ( Uhl-Bien and Marion 2008 : pp. xvii–xix).

Despite this disconnect between intentions and causality, intentions remain central to leadership as a source of change. The deliberate efforts of Bouazizi to protest against the caste-like restrictions of his situation and that of other people like him made his actions leadership even if only a catalytic one rather than the causal factor in removing or reducing those restrictions. This interpretation of causation marks a shift from implicit or explicit assumptions about leadership as leader-centric command and control, to more process-centric and purpose-centric approaches to leadership, thus placing emphasis for the success of an initiative on behalf of shared values and common benefits on its context and environment. Leadership emerges as a necessary but not sufficient condition for change with an emphasis on its context, intention, and values rather than causality of events.

Power, Position, and Authority

All three of the people whom we are discussing had no authority for the initiative that they took for shared values and the benefit of others. This violates the assumption that leadership, especially political leadership, goes along with power, position, and authority. This hails from a venerable tradition going back to Max Weber (1946) , who discussed politics in terms of the formal authority of the state and its use of physical force. Joseph Nye (2008) ‘softens’ power to include influence as well as coercion, but still assumes, however, that a leader has the power, position, and authority to choose influence or coercion. Bouazizi, Walesa, and Parks, however, did not have positions of authority with power and thus no choice about how to use that power. Their leadership had to do with the role they played without the ordinary accoutrements of power ( Couto 1995 ). Thus civic leadership requires us to shift our attention from power over others to coerce compliance, to non-coercive power with others to resist coercion and caste-like restrictions. This power starts with power within that rejects the dominant cognitive and cultural forms that legitimize authority ( VeneKlasen and Miller 2002 ; Gaventa 2006 ).

The conventional view of leadership as positional authority (rather than the act of leading) dates back to and continues the myth of heroes with its emphasis on personal traits, including charisma, and person-centric causation theories about leadership ( Hook 1992 ; Flowers 2010 ). Ronald A. Heifetz regards the conflation of leadership with position and authority as the ‘central source of confusion in the leadership field’ ( Heifetz 2007 : 42). He illustrates this point in recounting the leadership of Lois, a First Nation tribal member of British Colombia, in addressing the epidemic of alcoholism within her band. Lois went out every Tuesday night for several months before her friend and babysitter Maggie got curious and followed her, with children in tow, to the tribal community centre. They saw Lois sitting in a folding chair within a circle of other chairs, all of them empty. When Lois got home, Maggie asked her what she was doing, and Lois explained that she was holding an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting. It was three years before people began attending those meetings and ten years before the room was full. Lois’s example and commitment inspired Maggie, and the two of them achieved remarkable success in their efforts. Heifetz concludes his story with a paean to leadership as the action of ordinary people.

The world is full of people like Maggie and Lois…who have exercised leadership sometimes only at key moments, and sometimes in sustained efforts, but quietly without notice…So to equate leadership with authority not only ignores a widespread and critically important social phenomenon, but also does injustice to all of these heroic people practicing necessary everyday leadership. ( Heifetz 2007 : 36–7)

Robert Tucker (1995) makes an equally powerful critique of another debilitating conflation, that of politics and power. Critiquing Weber, Tucker distinguished between constituted and non-constituted leaders—those with formal authority and those without it—and included both in his definition of a political leader: ‘One who gives direction, or meaningfully participates in the giving of direction, to the activities of a political community’ ( Tucker 1995 : 15). He extends the boundaries of politics beyond the state; replaces power as the foci of politics with values, the well-being of the polity; and suggests that non-constituted leadership has a large role in promoting the well-being of a political community.

In practice, non-constituted or unauthorized leadership brings ‘creeping crises’ ( Boin et al. 2005 : 16) to the attention of society and to constituted political leaders who have the authority to handle apparent or acute crises. Tucker calls this political function signalizing —‘appraising leaders of circumstances that appear meaningful enough to merit diagnosis and response’ ( Tucker 1995 : 31). Both non-constituted and constituted leadership have subsequent political roles in defining the attention demanding conditions and mobilizing support for their remedy. The unique authority of constituted leadership entails responsibility to prescribe action and policy and assign responsibility to carry them out. Heifetz refines the power of constituted leadership further when he explains authority as conferred power: a resource provided to a constituted leadership to do the adaptive work of responding to changes or conditions in a group’s environment that challenge its well-being ( Heifetz 1994 : 8, 49, 57, 103).

Civic leadership, such as the examples we have used, may signal that constituted leadership has ignored or denied a creeping crisis long enough and challenge the legitimacy of its conferred power and authority. This happens in elections. When elections are not sufficient, civic leadership may devise new ways, such as advocacy and contentious politics, to express the illegitimacy of authority. These challenges shift our attention away from A’s coercive power over B to the far more important cultural and cognitive dimensions of power. These dimensions construct the legitimacy of constituted and non-constituted authority and ordinarily make coercion unnecessary or, if necessary, legitimate ( Foucault 1980 ; Tucker 1995 : 79–85; Lukes 2005 ). Civic leadership with its ubiquitous question ‘Why?’ confronts the hidden dimensions of power. Steven Lukes called them the second and third dimensions of power, which operate to modify the public’s wants, needs, desires, and beliefs, and politicizes culture ( Lukes 2005 ; Calhoun 2011 : 315; Gaventa 2011 ). Michel Foucault, like Lukes, distinguished coercive and non-coercive forms of power, sovereign and non-sovereign, and called the latter the regime of truth where we find the central problem of politics: ‘detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ ( Foucault 1980 : 133).

Despite the hegemonic appearances of power and authority as Foucault and Lukes portray them, Paulo Freire maintains another form of power that comes with the possibility of people knowing the political and social ramifications of their knowledge and culture ( Freire 1993 : 96; see also Horton and Freire 1990 ). He argues that, since the reality of non-coercive forms of power comes from a cultural process in which we all participate, there is also a possibility for the social reconstruction of reality, a pedagogy of liberation ( Freire 1993 : 56). The recurrence and ubiquity of civic leadership for social change suggests that Freire’s hope is well founded: ordinary people, such as Lois and Maggie, can and do take unauthorized actions of leadership that challenge sovereign as well as non-sovereign forms of power. The practice of civic leadership not only broadens our understanding of the cultural and cognitive dimensions of power, position, and authority, but also suggests the non-coercive power of those without position and authority to confer and withdraw the legitimacy of authority from those with them.

Civic Leadership and Followers

When we take away position, authority, and coercive power from civic leadership, the subordination of ‘followers’, implied ordinarily in leadership studies, becomes problematic. Heifetz explains the inadequacy of the term ‘followership’ in those instances where leadership inspires the agency of others and the power within to find power with others.

The black and white people mobilized by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s felt mobilized to exercise leadership themselves; and most became engaged citizens. Few, if any, had an experience of ‘followership’. In short, the term inaccurately describes a leadership that mobilizes responsibility-taking and generates more leadership. ( Heifetz 2007 : 41–2).

Although specific to Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Heifetz’s words describe the engaged people of the Arab spring and the Solidarity Movement in Poland and beyond. Lest we link civic leadership only with social movements, his observation applies to the alcoholics and addicts whom Lois and Maggie assisted to attempt their own recovery.

Burns recognizes the interdependence of leaders and followers and attempts to distinguish among them by a difference in initiative. The first, or proximal, action ‘breaks up a static situation and establishes a relationship’ ( Burns 2003 : 172). The efficacy of this first action, though, does depend upon others to take their own initiative on behalf of the values and benefits expressed, however inchoately, in that first action ( Tucker 1995 : 86). In this sense, civic leadership attracts other leaders, not followers, who act on their own behalf for shared values and for benefits for others like them. If they are followers, it is only because of the sequence of the discovery of their powers enabling them to take efficacious action with others. In this sense, all of leadership follows upon the initiative of others that preceded it, even if only to leave a legacy and strategy of resistance and pride in the group ( Walters 2007 : 152).

In addition to time as sequence, civic leadership entails space, physical ( Evans and Boyte 1992 ; Evans 2010 ; Boyte 2011 ), psychological ( VeneKlasen and Miller 2002 ), and, increasingly, virtual ( Shirky 2009 ), to mobilize responsibility-taking and the initiative of others. The space of the conventional considerations of leadership is organizational with an implied hierarchy; leadership is the space above a subordinate until you get to the top of the pyramid. The spaces of civic leadership begin within people who identify with a narrative that conveys the values of a group and explains the need for action on its behalf. The narratives that legitimate marginalization, human need, and caste-like restrictions, the hidden dimensions of power, find their counter-narrative in the shared spaces of civic leadership. James Scott (1990) argues that oppressed groups, such as Bouazizi’s counterparts and those of Walesa and Parks, maintain a set of ‘hidden transcripts’, their own knowledge of what is right and true, and hence their own power, in spite of an apparent allegiance to mechanisms of domination, the non-sovereign forms of power. ‘The process of domination generates a hegemonic public conduct and a backstage discourse consisting of what cannot be spoken in the face of [coercive] power’ ( Scott 1990 : p. xii). When public dissent or even free speech is not permissible in public, it continues in ‘free spaces’—semi-public places, such as some faith-based or labour groups, and more private spaces where small groups of like-minded dissidents may gather. Sara Evans, one of the first theorists on free spaces, suggest that free spaces are

key preconditions for democratic insurgencies, and…fundamental requirements for sustaining democratic societies in the face of consolidating power in globalizing corporations and massive state bureaucracies…Free spaces are those spaces of political freedom—even when they are niches in an otherwise totalitarian context—in which people can use the freedom to speak as equals to begin the process of envisioning a democratic future that they can work toward together. ( Evans 2010 : 359)

In the words of Jackie Reed, a community organizer in Chicago, leadership may be defined in terms of this provision of space. ‘Leadership sets up an opportunity for others to give their gifts, for others to contribute to community’ (Reed, in Couto 2002 : p. xii).

John Gaventa and his colleagues at the Institute for Development Studies explore the concept of power and empowerment in connection with space. Free spaces are those spaces for political participation that marginalized groups make for themselves: sometimes publicly taken—for example, Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square, and Plaza de Mayo—and sometimes borrowed for a political purpose—a union hall or theatre such as the Green Lantern in Prague during the Velvet Revolution. In these spaces, people rediscover the human agency that Freire holds dear—the capacity of people to make history as well as being made by it.

5 The Future of Civic Leadership

Civic leadership suggests a space for politics and political associations outside the state and with power other than coercion. In its forms of advocacy and contention, civic leadership gives additional meaning to politics as the art of the possible by raising our sights to new possibilities for democratic equality and processes of representation and participation. What would a methodology look like that reflected this subject of study? It would seem to require the sociological imagination ( Mills 1959 ) that finds public issues in personal troubles; the signalizing function of civic leadership ( Tucker 1995 ); and normative assumptions about democracy, democratic practice, power, and human agency. The validity and legitimacy of the voices of civic leadership are much more likely to be claimed by researchers employing ethnographic methods grounded in phenomenology and the social construction of meaning than by researchers wedded to modernist-empiricist assumptions of social science research ( Guba and Lincoln 2000 ). This may mean a range of methodologies that explicitly promote democratic ends and means by not only the study of or even for civic leadership, but through participatory action research with and by civic leadership ( Couto, Hippensteel Hall, and Goetz 2005 ). The more it reflects its subject, the more the study of civic leadership may have to deal with the authoritative allocation of values, the politics, of research. Civic leadership informs us that, behind politics, there is power.

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