Leadership: What It Means, What It Does, and What We Want to Know About It

Leaders are part of virtually all organized political life. There have been important recent advances in modeling “leaders” as well as clever and innovative empirical studies. We review recent contributions from the political science, economics, and management literatures. We discuss the extent to which these new works represent advances over the major classic works on leadership and organization from the twentieth century. We identify important gaps, chief among them (a) theorizing a role for coercion, (b) modeling the endogenous emergence of leaders, and (c) empirically disentangling the effect of an individual leader from her office, especially when leaders emerge endogenously.