The Active Follower: What Young Voters Look for in Political Leaders and Parties

Abstract

A key aspect of citizenship lies in the way that ordinary citizens relate to leaders, and a key question has to do with whether active leadership and active citizenship can be complementary rather than contradictory. In this paper we draw upon a social identity model in order to address this question. We report a study of 28 young Italians who completed a diary before and after the Italian general election of 2006. The analysis focuses on the criteria used by respondents in order to evaluate leaders and their parties. The first part, an in-depth thematic investigation of two diaries, shows that the diarists do not passively accept the constructions used by politicians, but rather deliberate both over their own identities and the way that politicians relate to these identities. They focus on three dimensions of the leader-citizen relationship: whether leaders are ingroup members ('one of us'), whether they act in the group interest ('act for us') and whether they are effective in advancing group goals ('deliver for us'). The second part consists of a quantitative content analysis, examining whether, and how often, each respondent raises these three dimensions. It shows that they are widely used and that the predominant concern is whether leaders 'deliver for us'. We examine the implications of these findings for both leadership and citizenship research, arguing that both leaders and citizens can be actively involved in shaping definitions of identity and the extent to which identity based goals are realised by parties and their policies.