Democratic Political Leadership in the New Media Age: A Farewell to Excellence?

Abstract

This article looks into the ambiguous effects that ‘mediatisation’ in its various forms has had, or may have, on the conditions for good democratic political leadership by prime ministers and presidents in established western democracies. For the purposes of this article, good democratic political leadership is defined in terms of three fundamental criteria: authenticity, effectiveness and responsibility. Whereas the ‘new media age’ offers political chief executives some distinct opportunities with regard to all three criteria, these tend to be outweighed by a wealth of media-related constraints which in sum make good democratic political leadership considerably more difficult and demanding than ever. Understood as a publicly responsible profession, contemporary political science, and comparative executive leadership research more specifically, faces two inter-related tasks: to penetrate empirically the notorious smokescreens of executive politics, and to provide the public with reasonable standards for evaluating the performance of executive leaders.