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.
In 1994, Kymlicka and Norman wrote: "In 1978 it could be confidently stated that 'the concept of citizenship has gone out of fashion among political thinkers'... Fifteen years later, citizenship has become the 'buzz word' among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum" (p. 352). Since then, there has been a continuing and 'spectacular' growth in citizenship studies (
However, the shift since the 1990s is not just in the volume of work, but also in its focus. While the concept of citizenship as a balance of rights and obligations deriving from membership of a polity can be traced back as far as Aristotle's Politics, modern citizenship studies are generally traced back to the end of World War 2, and to the work of Thomas
For some, the contrast between a passive and an active notion of citizenship can be mapped onto a right/left political spectrum (e.g.
This focus on the active citizen necessarily brings a discussion of what skills, virtues and attitudes are necessary in order for people to exercise their citizenship. Many of these have been identified, such as the need for courage, open-mindedness, cooperation and social participation, a work ethic, self-restraint, respect for others and so on (e.g.
On the one hand, it has been argued that leadership is essential for a 'good society' where people act rationally and virtually so as to sustain a fair democratic society. This position is advocated forcefully by Rousseau in his discussion of the role of the 'legislator' in book two of the Social Contract (
On the other hand, it has been argued that leaders are a threat to the active citizen and that 'top down' authority obliterates 'bottom up' citizenship. Contemporaneously with Rousseau, Tom Paine argued against the monarch and characterised any political authority not entirely rooted in the citizenship as tyranny. He famously began his pamphlet 'Common Sense' with a quote: "Man knows no Master save creating HEAVEN" (
In sum, the relationship between leaders and citizens has always been a topic of key concern in the citizenship literature, but the relationship between the two has always been fraught. Should we embrace or fear the strong leader? Does leadership agency scaffold or obliterate the agency of followers? Is it possible to have both a strong leader and strong citizens? These are questions which remain unresolved. In order to address these questions, let us now turn to the literature on leadership.
Work on citizenship and leadership research have developed side by side, with little interchange between the two. Yet both are structured around the same tension. In the period leading up to 1945 strong leaders were regarded as essential for society to cope with its problems. In an increasingly dull soulless and mechanised world, Weber, for instance, saw charismatic authority as the sole antidote to "the routinized economic cosmos" where the prospect was of "a polar night of icy hardness and darkness" (cited in
Over the ensuing years, this flip-flopping between models that characterise leaders as creating the social and those which characterise leaders as being constrained by the social has continued. Indeed the contrast has become more explicitly focussed on how leaders relate to ordinary citizens (generally referred to as 'followers'). Thus, transactional models represent leadership as an economic exchange where followers will do a leader's bidding to the extent that they receive (or anticipate) rewards in return (
It might seem that leadership research reproduces rather than resolves the dilemmas of citizenship research concerning the relationship between leaders and citizens. The problem essentially has to do with the fact that leader agency and citizen agency are conceptualised in terms of a zero-sum game. The more one has of the one, the less one has of the other. However, in recent years a social identity approach to leadership has been formulated in order to challenge this traditional opposition.
The social identity approach conceptualises leadership as a social relationship between would-be leaders and members within a specific social group. That is, a leader is not just a leader, but a leader of a nation, a political party, a religion or whatever (for overviews see
But this is not the only way in which the leader is agentic. Leaders do not simply act on pre-existing understandings of groups and seek to represent them. Rather, and fourth, they actively construe group identities in order to make themselves and their proposals appear representative. Skilled leaders invoke categories that make their intended audiences cohere as members of a common group, they persuade audience members that own plans of action are an instantiation of group norms and values and also that the outcomes of action reflect the achievement of these values. In all these ways, leaders can be seen as 'entrepreneurs of identity' who actively define group identities, and who, by doing so effectively, mobilise the social forces which can then be deployed to shape social reality (
Where leadership is successful in all these respects – that is, where aspirants are able to constitute themselves as being of the group, acting on behalf of the group and delivering for the group – it can lead to an intense bond whereby each individual group member feels intimately attached and attracted to the leader (
The key point here is that, while it is acknowledged that leaders can use their agency to diminish that of other group members, this is not inherent in the nature of leadership (cf.
Having said that, whatever a social identity model of leadership allows in theory, in practice research has almost completely ignored this issue. The work that has been done can be divided into two broad categories (see
Our study looks specifically at young people, not least because this is a group much neglected in the citizenship literature (
Our sample fell into the same age bracket as Tom Burke. It consisted of young Italian voters aged between 18 and 20 who we followed during the general election of April 2006. For two weeks before the election dates of 9th/10th April, and for one week after, they were asked to complete a diary where they recorded all their thoughts and conversations about the election along with all the election materials they had been exposed to and their reaction to it.
The use of such a methodology was due to the fact that diaries provide an open format where people can continuously record data during, or at least shortly after, events occur (
In particular, diaries have been used successfully with young people in order to keep track of their thoughts, feelings and behaviours (e.g.
Through the diaries, we address two issues. The first is exploratory. It has to do with what people look for in their representatives, what grounds they use to evaluate them and to choose between them. Moreover, how do people relate to the positions as defined by these representatives themselves: do they passively accept them or else actively evaluate and reformulate them? Linked to this, we are interested in how people organise their considerations and evaluations over time. Do they have a simple and consistent point of view, linked to the views of the representatives, which is stated and restated on different occasions? Or else do they have a more ambivalent position, deliberating over what they hear, bringing different considerations to bear at different times? These are qualitative questions necessitating a qualitative analysis. Moreover, insofar as we are interested in the temporal organisation of arguments within an account – and not simply the nature of the different arguments used across accounts – the first part of our analysis provides detailed thematic investigations of two diaries allowing us to see both the range of arguments used and the development of the argument across the three weeks during which it was filled in.
The second issue is confirmatory. Drawing on social identity models of leadership, we seek to examine the extent to which people are concerned with leaders as 'group champions'. More specifically, we analyse how often our participants evaluate leaders and their parties in terms of (a) being prototypical members of the ingroup (being 'one of us'); (b) acting in the interests of the group rather than their own interest or the interest of an outgroup ('act for us'); (c) being effective in terms of advancing group interests in practice ('deliver for us'). These are quantitative questions necessitating quantitative analysis. Accordingly, the second part of our analysis consists of a quantitative content analysis of all the diaries in our sample.
The study involved 28 Italian young people who voted for the first time in the general election of April 2006. The participants (9 men and 19 women) were aged between 18 and 20 years. Of these, 16 were final year students at a high school in Bologna, 9 were members of a local group organised by a local parish Catholic Church in Bologna and 3 were first year students at the University of Bologna.
Permission to approach school students was first obtained through the Head Teacher of their High School. Once this had been obtained, the first author met with two classes with a total of 44 students, explained the nature of the study and asked for volunteers (the volunteering rate was 16 out of 44, 36%). Permission to approach the members of the Church group – the main activity of which was a weekly meeting where they could discuss their personal issues with the guidance of a tutor – was obtained through the group organiser. Again, once this had been obtained, the first author met with a group of 25 young people, explained the nature of the study and asked for volunteers (the volunteering rate was 9 out of 25, 36%). Finally, the university students were recruited via a snowball technique. This began with a student known to the researcher, who introduced her to two further students willing to participate in the study. All the participants lived in Bologna during the period of the study. In all cases, the decision to take part in the study was voluntary.
The diary instrument was a folder containing multiple copies of three different forms, each printed on paper of a different colour in order to facilitate recognition. The three forms were:
"
"
"
Having explained the nature of the study and what was required of participants, the researcher then handed the diary folder to each volunteer. As well as the forms previously described, each folder contained a set of instructions to help the participants fill in the diary correctly. The participants were required to keep a diary for three weeks (two weeks before and one week after the political Italian elections of 9th and 10th of April 2006). More specifically, they were asked to write in the diary every time they were involved in conversations, gathered information or thought about politics and elections. Participants were told that the diaries would only be read by the researchers. Further, to guarantee anonymity, they were asked to choose a nickname for themselves which they should use consistently throughout their diary. They were also asked to refer to others by a nickname. In the first week the researcher met the participants to make sure that they were using the forms correctly and, if necessary, to correct any misunderstandings or misusage. In the event, there were no problems of usage. At the conclusion of the study, the researcher collected the forms from all participants and gave them a full debriefing concerning the rationale and aims of the study.
As already indicated, we conducted two types of analysis on the data. For the first, we read all the diaries and among them we chose two diaries – Dede and Bego's – to form the focus of our thematic investigation. These were not chosen on the basis of representativeness, but rather of richness. That is, in order to investigate both the range of considerations, and the way in which they are organised over time, we have selected two diaries which contain a particularly broad set of entries and which therefore allow us to examine issues of consistency or variability.
We then used thematic analysis (
Accordingly, then, we first translated the diaries into English. Then we read them iteratively, developing codes for the way in which the diarists evaluated political leaders and parties. We continued this process until further readings did not develop the coding frame. We then reassembled these codes into a timeline for each diary, paying particular attention to the development of themes over the time when the diaries were completed: continuities and discontinuities over time, the introduction of new themes and tensions between themes at different time points. We present each diary separately, examining the nature and temporality of themes.
For the second analysis into the incidence of different relationships between leaders/parties and group memberships (are they 'one of us', do they 'act for the group', do they 'deliver for the group') we employed a quantitative content analysis (
Dede's first form followed a conversation with her teacher and classmates at school:
"
The repeated use of 'we' in the second half of this extract clearly positions her through a left identity and suggests a fairly straightforward approach to the political process: she will support left-wing politicians. But her next form, filled in the next day, complicates matters. Dede invokes a different identity – Catholic – and observes: "
Dede went on to analyse the roots of this difficulty. For her, the problem lies in a lack of information, partly due to the media who prefer "
A few days later Dede provided a powerful example to buttress the claim that politicians as a class are solely oriented to winning and to their own power. A baby had been kidnapped and murdered. Politicians commented on the story during the TV news: "
On the same day, she returned to the more general dilemma. Dede relates how her friends had different opinions, but none were confident and: "
This amalgam of issues continued to characterise Dede's diary in the days leading up to the election on April 9th. On April 4th she commented favourably on a TV debate between the two candidates for Prime Minister, Prodi and Berlusconi: "
Also on April 4th, Dede commented negatively on political leaflets in general, and the contempt they seem to show for the electorate: "
On the election day itself, Dede stressed that, if anything, the process of decision making actually gets harder when one enters the polling booth:
"
Finally, in her last entry on April 11th, Dede reflected on the results:
"
Ultimately, then, her concern returns to what the government will deliver for 'us', whether it will advance the collective interest. At this point, the reference is clearly to a national interest.
If Dede started her diary by adopting a clear (left) position and then gradually introduced the complexities of her multiple positions (Catholic and Italian), Bego's dilemma was rather different. Throughout his diary, he positioned himself clearly as a Catholic. He consistently articulated an intention to vote on the basis of his Catholicism. At one point, for instance (April 7th) Bego states: "
Bego (like Dede) was keen to root his decision in the evidence and hence his dilemma was compounded by the fact that good evidence (as opposed to mere hearsay) is hard to come by:
"
Bego looks to guidance from those in 'authoritative positions' but finds either that they are no more certain than he is (
The next day, March 31st, Bego reacts to a leaflet from the right-wing party the Alleanza Nationale (AN), led by Gianfranco Fini, which has come through his letterbox:
"
This both restates and extends Bego's previously expressed concerns. First, it is a rejection of the AN because of the content of their politics – anti-environmentalist and implicitly pro-fascist. Second, however, it is a rejection of the AN because of the form of their politics. It is not just that what politicians say is untrustworthy, it is also that it contains more polemic than information. This is not only counter-normative (arrogant and proud) but also fails the voter in providing no grounds to make an informed decision.
It is worth stressing that Bego's concerns are less to do with the target of AN's polemic (criticism of the candidate he favours) than with the negativity per se. Later, on April 8th, Bego writes about an email he has received concerning the election: "
Going back a little, to April 6th, and returning to the issue of political content, Bego commented on a TV program where several politicians were interviewed. This, he found very helpful:
"
This entry is particularly rich and reveals the multiple (and potentially competing) dimensions along which parties/candidates are evaluated. It is important that they reflect 'our' (Catholic) values. It is important that they can be trusted to work for our advantage as opposed to their own. It is important that they are practical and able to deliver. It is no good to have good values but be unable to deliver on them. It is no good to be able to deliver, but not on the basis of good values. What counts is the best conjunction of these various dimensions.
This multidimensionality, combining principles and pragmatics, is equally clear in another entry written on the same day – the day before the election – where Bego sums up his final decision to vote for Prodi and his Ulivo party:
"
Most of Bego's explanation is taken up with the issue of matching party policies and Catholic values, either implicitly or explicitly. Thus, he has earlier stressed that the Church is (or should) be associated with equality and social solidarity. Ulivo represents that in its economic, education and immigration policies. Equally, it shows compassion towards gay people without violating beliefs concerning the primacy of the family. But Bego's vote is also about ensuring that these values/policies are enacted. He chooses a party which can ensure a stable government that can deliver on its program.
Perhaps the clearest thing to emerge from these diaries is summed up in Dede's assertion that 'voting is now a hard struggle'. While both Dede and Bego root their decisions in their identities and in the prioritisation of collective values, this does not make life any easier for them. They cannot map identity onto the vote in any straightforward way. Their difficulties arise precisely out of the complexity of this mapping exercise. It is this that they deliberate over, and their deliberations occur on two levels.
To start with, they deliberate over which identities are relevant, over the key values/beliefs associated with those identities, and over the relationship between those values/beliefs and the politicians/parties they have to choose between. Dede more than Bego invokes different identities at different times, although Bego does occasionally talk of how policies will impact the country alongside his main focus on Catholicism. Both Dede and Bego talk of different values/beliefs associated with the same identity, notably varying at different times in the extent to which they invoke equality, compassion and family as Catholic beliefs. Most obviously, as already highlighted, they struggle over the way that party programs relate to these beliefs.
It is clear, then, that these young people don't simply or passively absorb the identity definitions and identity positions offered by politicians. They actively construe their own identities and hence the groups through which they relate to different parties and leaders – as Catholics, as Italians, as young people or whatever. However – and this takes us to the other area of deliberation – they also actively construe various different aspects of the way in which parties/leaders relate to any given group membership. We can discern three such aspects, which map on to the three dimensions identified by social identity models of leadership.
First, both diarists are concerned with whether politicians are part of the ingroup or else a group apart. To put it slightly differently, is a leader to be regarded as an exceptional instance of 'our' category or else an ordinary instance of an exceptional category? We see this, for instance, in Dede's comment: "
Second, both diarists are concerned with the question of whether, irrespective of their own group membership, politicians act in terms of 'our' group interest (however this is defined in the diary). That is, it is possible that the politician is ingroup but acts for their personal interest or equally possible that the politician is outgroup but still advances the ingroup interest. Sometimes this is exemplified in the discussion of values. Thus Bego does not consider the left-wing Ulivo party or its leader Prodi to be Catholic, but his concern is whether its policies will advance or else compromise those things that he as a Catholic values: equality compassion and family in particular. Sometimes it is addressed in more generic terms, as when Bego observes that the campaign "
Third, both diarists are concerned not simply with whether politicians act for their group, but whether they are capable of delivering for the group. Do they have the competence, the influence, the power to embed policies that promote the group interest? This is particularly obvious in Bego's diary when he plumps for Ulivo on the grounds that it is the best compromise between Catholic values and practical management skills, and when he again explains his decision on the basis of both value based policies and the ability to sustain a working government. But it is also there in Dede's desire for a coalition that can "
It is important, however, to recall at this point that the two diaries we selected were not meant to be representative, but chosen precisely for their richness. They may point to the range of considerations that are invoked and to the fact that young voters
Drawing on the thematic investigations above, we defined a series of general coding criteria and also a series of specific criteria for allocation of instances to our three analytic categories.
The general criteria were as follows:
coding only referred to participants own deliberations, not their reports of those of others
coding related to considerations of what party/leader to vote for, not whether to vote at all
each form was coded for whether material falling into each of the analytic categories was present or not, not for how many instances were found.
The specific criteria were as follows:
Clearly, there is considerable potential for overlap between these categories. Thus, for instance, a statement of the form "politicians act in their own interests" addresses both categories (a) and (b): politicians are outgroup on the basis that they all fail to act for the group interest. Equally, statements of the form "this politician has improved our situation" addresses both categories (b) and (c): the person has acted for the ingroup and done so effectively. Where such cases of overlap occur in the diaries, we have proceeded in the following way. Where possible, and in order to avoid oversampling, we coded into only one category, using whichever category provided the focus of the statement (which was generally the higher order and more specific category; b over a, and c over b). For instance a statement like "politicians act in their own interests" would be coded as b, and "this politician has improved our situation" would be coded as c. Only in cases where a statement had two clearly separable clauses relating to the different categories would we double code. For instance "politicians are all the same and they all act in their own interests" we would code in both categories a and b. For the results of our analysis, see
Participants | 'One of us' | 'Act for us' | 'Deliver for us' |
---|---|---|---|
University Group | |||
Alice | 1 | 8 | |
Zingara | 1 | 1 | 4 |
Toki Toki | 1 | 7 | |
School Group | |||
Dede | 2 | 1 | 3 |
Homer | 2 | 3 | 7 |
Topo | 2 | ||
Campanellino | 4 | ||
Holly | |||
Guanciottine | |||
Silvietta | 1 | ||
L'Ale | 1 | ||
Elexx87 | |||
Trillina | 1 | 3 | |
Pigruz | 2 | ||
Biba | 1 | ||
Tox | 4 | ||
Mou | 1 | 1 | |
Angel | 2 | ||
Elisa | 4 | 4 | |
Church Group | |||
Bego | 3 | 3 | |
Biribissi | 1 | 1 | |
Lord Byron | 1 | ||
Giorgio Mastrota | 1 | ||
Napoleone | 2 | 2 | |
Dylan Portnoy | 1 | 1 | |
Elefantino | 1 | 1 | |
Gabbo | 2 | ||
Chiodo | 1 | 1 | |
TOTAL | 11 | 20 | 63 |
As can be seen, 25 of the 28 respondents (89%) make mention of at least one of the three categories. What is more, these categories are mentioned on a total of 94 forms (an average of 3.4 mentions per participant).
Nine out of 28 participants (32%) mention the first category ('one of us') at least once in the whole diary, and, overall, there are mentions on 11 forms (an average of 0.4 mentions per participant). Twelve out of 28 participants (43%) mention the second category ('act for us') at least once in the whole diary, and, overall, there are mentions on 20 forms (an average of 0.7 mentions per participant). Twenty one out of 28 participants (75%) mention the third category ('deliver for us') at least once in the whole diary, and, overall, there are mentions on 63 forms (an average of 2.3 mentions per participant).
A Cochran's
Perhaps the clearest thing to come out of our analysis is how thoughtful, deliberative and active these young voters were. Just as much as the candidates who sought to secure their vote, they were 'entrepreneurs of identity' – their own identity. From our thematic investigation, we see in detail how specific individuals construe their social identities and the various ways in which parties and their leaders relate to these identities – often using very different constructions of identity than those used by the parties and leaders themselves. As Dede puts it, this is a hard task. Not only does one have to define the key elements of one's identity (does being Catholic refer more to social equality or to the traditional family), one also has to decide how party policies impact on these elements and also whether one can trust what they say. There are multiple dimensions of uncertainty.
We also see how, over time, there is variation both in the nature of one's relevant identity and in the various dimensions by which politicians and their parties impact identity. Should one relate to the electoral process in terms of religious, generational, national, political or some other identity? Dede might be right that 'voting is now a hard struggle for us Christians' but it gets even harder when one layers on the additional complexity that one may be struggling as a Christian, a young person, an Italian, or a leftist at different terms and each of these changes the terms of the debate.
Moving on to the quantitative analysis, we see how the great majority of participants do indeed invoke the relationship between parties/leaders and social identities at least once in their diaries – indeed, on average they do so on between three and four of their diary forms. It might be argued that this is relatively rare in a diary that was kept for three weeks and where participants were asked to record all their conversations, all the electoral information they encountered and all the thoughts they had. However, it is worth noting that, on average, participants only completed roughly nine forms in total. Moreover, many of these forms were only descriptive and did not address their voting intentions (recall that we only coded instances where participants were addressing their own considerations regarding voting for a particular candidate), or when they did were often addressed to the validity and credibility of the information they received. It could be argued that such considerations imply a distrust of politicians and hence fit into our first analytic category – are parties/leaders seen as 'one of us'. However, as we have explained, we were conservative in our coding procedures and only included instances where categorical inclusion was unambiguous.
These points are illustrated by considering the three cases (out of 28) where participants were not coded as invoking any of our three analytic categories. All three (Holly, Guanciottine and Elexx77) focus principally on their lack of knowledge and their need to obtain more information. This is particularly clear in the case of Elexx77 who repeatedly reflects on the state of her knowledge: "I gained more knowledge about the topic"; "our knowledge is very limited and we need more information"; "we checked our knowledge about politics"; "I already knew the main things". Additionally, they do sometimes comment on whether they like or dislike a particular policy (Holly, for instance, expresses her worries about civil unions and that they might lead to gay adoption) but without explaining the grounds of their attitude.
Overall, what is striking in these cases is that they avoid mention of the factors determining how people vote rather than provide alternative criteria for determining the vote. What is particularly striking is the absence of criteria based on individual (as opposed to collective) self-interest. Where people choose politicians and parties it is more to do with what they mean for 'us' as Catholics, Italians or whatever, than what they mean for 'me'. In all the 264 forms, there are just a couple of exceptions to this. In one Homer states "as far as I am concerned, I care about what involves me directly" and he goes on to refer to school reform, rising prices and the little money he has left at the end of the month. In another Zingara starts off by saying "I would like to be economically independent and this will be possible only if I find a stable and well paid job". But she then goes on to state: "I don't think this government has done anything for me and us, and being 19 I don't want to lose hope that something can change!". Even when individual interests are invoked, they are quickly tied to collective experiences, collective identities and collective interests. Zingara's plight is the plight of young people. The interest she invokes is one that is generational rather than personal.
All in all, to the extent that participants do deliberate over who to vote for, they do so primarily in terms of whether candidates and parties represent, act for and deliver for a social category with which they identify.
Before discussing the implications of these findings for leadership, citizenship, and the relationship between them, it is first necessary to be clear about a number of qualifications to our analysis. This study involved young Italians who volunteered to take part in a diary study of a general election. Each of these specificities places some limits upon the conclusions we can draw.
First, consider the issue of youth. We explained the value of such a sample in terms of the way that it had been ignored in traditional citizenship studies and that, even when addressed, this had generally been in terms of passivity. There is therefore a particular value in showing the active and deliberative ways in which young people relate to leadership. If even they do so, one might argue, then anyone will. But one could invoke contrary logics. It could be, for instance, that precisely because they are new to the voting process and that they are having to choose between candidates for the first time, young people deliberate in ways that more seasoned (or jaded) voters might not.
But our sample wasn't just young. It was a very particular and unrepresentative set of young people. Notably, around a third of them (9 out of 28) were drawn from a Catholic group. This clearly relates to the nature of the identities which figured in the diaries (where religious and generational definitions appear very prominently). So we cannot easily generalise from the level of deliberation found in the diaries. Nor can we generalise from the types of identity that figure in the diaries. But neither of the considerations we have invoked about the sample can account for the fact that such deliberations as do occur centre on issues of identity and that they do so along the dimensions invoked by the social identity model of leadership.
Moving on, and leaving aside the issue of nationality (it could conceivably be that Italians deliberate on politics than any other nationality, and in different ways to any other nationality, but without invoking crude national stereotypes there are no particular reasons why this might be so), we come, second, to the issue of volunteering. Those who do agree to take part in such an onerous study (and, roughly, only a third of the populations that we appealed to did so) could reasonably be assumed to be those who are more interested in the topic of politics, who think about politics more than others and who deliberate more about politics than others. Again, we can only acknowledge the validity of such concerns, the need for more study, but at the same time insist that the fact that participants were volunteers may relate to the degree of deliberation we uncovered, but is less obviously related to the fact that this deliberation centred on social identity concerns.
These concerns about volunteering are likely to be compounded by the third issue – our use of diaries for data collection. Diary methodology requires participants to reflect continuously on the topic of concern (
Fourth and last, we come to the issue of the election. The relationship of voting to citizenship – particularly young peoples' citizenship – is a fraught issue. On the one hand, if one treats citizenship as a matter of rights (
Taking all four points together, then, a clear pattern of argument emerges. Most obviously, we need to exercise extreme caution in extrapolating from our results when it comes to the degree to which people actively deliberate over leaders and the positions they express. The fact that we have found critical scrutiny rather than uncritical acceptance – in other words, that we have uncovered active followership – may be a function of the method we used, the sample we selected, the way we chose people or the topic we asked them to consider. Clearly, as we have repeatedly stressed, ours is just an initial pinprick into a whole field of possibilities which remain to be explored. However it is important to stress that our principal interest is not so much in the
What is more, as well as being interested in the possibility of active followership, it should be clear that we have also been interested in the forms that such activity takes – and, more concretely, whether followers on the dimensions of a social identity analysis of leadership. While it is certainly possible that the fact this latter question has been answered in the affirmative comes down to the specificities of our study, there is no obvious reason why this should be so. As with any initial study, further confirmatory research is needed, but that does not undermine the significance of our findings. In sum, then, taking into account the various limitations of our study, we can still state with some confidence that followership
What, then, are the broader implications of our findings? In terms of leadership, the diaries provide convergent evidence for a social identity analysis of leadership. In addition to qualitative studies which show how leaders, as 'entrepreneurs of identity' construct self categories as a means of mobilising support (
However, the findings extend as well as consolidate a social identity analysis. First, social identity approaches to leadership initially concentrated on the perceived prototypicality of leaders (are they 'one of us' and do they represent in themselves what makes 'us' distinctive from other groups – see, for instance,
We need to hedge this conclusion in a couple of ways, however. On the one hand, as we argue above, being 'one of us' and 'acting for us' may be important precursors of 'delivering for us'. That is, sharing our identity and knowing what we value, along with aiming to deliver what we value, make it more likely that a leader can delivering what we value (even if they are not absolutely necessary). They are generally implicated in the act of delivering, but they are not sufficient on their own. So we are not suggesting that prototypicality and motivation are irrelevant, more that they are components of leadership rather than the proximate determinates of support.
On the other hand, it is possible that the relative under-emphasis on prototypicality and the perceived motivation of leaders may be a specific feature of contemporary politics rather than a general feature of leadership. As has been observed many times, trust in politicians has declined markedly in recent years (cf.
Secondly, this work extends a social identity account of leadership – which has stressed that leaders actively construe identity (
This then takes us back to the overarching topic of citizenship. We noted in the introduction that contemporary scholarship regards citizenship less as a matter of formal rights and responsibilities that are conferred on the individual and more as a matter of actively asserting rights and responsibilities. As we put it, citizenship denotes claims making. We also noted that this approach puts citizenship, as a 'bottom up' social process, in tension with leadership, seen as a 'top down' process.
We can now elaborate this tension a little further. As many scholars in many disciplines have noted over the years (e.g.
The whole thrust of this paper can be encapsulated as an attempt to answer in the negative: no, leadership definitions of who we are and what we should do are not inherently at odds with citizens' definitions of these same questions, and hence their embrace or rejection of these leaders. This is certainly true in a liberal democratic system like contemporary Italy, but there is some evidence that even in the most unpropitious circumstances, people still appropriate, manipulate and contest the leaders words rather than simply absorb them. For instance,
In concluding, however, we want to take the discussion a little further. Once we acknowledge that leadership agency and citizenship agency are not
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