Australasian Political Studies Association Conference 2003
Hosted by the School of Government
University of Tasmania

Political Theory Stream

Leadership: The democratic dilemma

John Kane
Assoc. Prof., School of Politics and Public Policy
Griffith University, Queensland

Abstract:

My paper draws attention to a remarkable gap in the existing literature on democratic theory, namely an absence of serious attention to the question of democratic leadership. There is no body of theory that provides, or attempts to provide, a reasoned explanation of, and foundation for, the role of leadership in democracies. I argue that this absence is no accident, but itself tells us a lot about the problem of democratic leadership, which is precisley that leadership is a problem for democratic theory. Leadership seems both necessary for democracy and antithetical to its central ethos. Contemporary theory deals with this problem largely by passing over it in embarrassed silence, or by pursuing more ideally 'democratic' political forms that implicitly echew the need for leadership.