Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2183-2463

Review | Open Access

Leadership in Precarious Contexts: Studying Political Leaders after the Global Financial Crisis

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Abstract:  A series of crises and traumatic events, such as the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 global financial crisis, seem to have influenced the environment within which modern political leaders act. We explore the scholarly literature on political leadership and crisis since 2008 to evaluate what sorts of questions are being engaged, and identify some new lines of inquiry. We find several scholars are contributing much insight from the perspective of leadership and crisis management. Several analysts are investigating the politics of crisis from a decentralist perspective, focusing on local leadership in response to challenging events. As well, studying how citizens interpret, respond to, or resist leaders’ signals is a developing area of inquiry. While our study reveals some debate about the nature of crisis, and whether the context has changed significantly, most of the scholarship reviewed here holds modern politicians face large challenges in exercising leadership within precarious contexts.

Keywords:  complexity; elites; global financial crisis; leaders; leadership; leadership literature; political leadership; risk; uncertainty

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v4i2.582


© Cristine de Clercy, Peter A. Ferguson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.