Making Sense of Leadership Outcomes

Abstract

We show how contemporary scholars have tried to make sense of the study of political leadership and present our institutional theory of leadership outcomes. We establish the basic interactionist paradigm within which the study of leadership outcomes is generally conducted. We show how this paradigm is consistent with both a scientific realist foundation and a Peircean form of American pragmatism. We present an institutional account of political leadership. We are interested in how leadership institutions can help to explain political outcomes. We show how an institutional approach provides us with the conceptual tools to make at least modest claims about the causes of leadership outcomes.