Leadership in the Political and Public Domain

Course goals

After completing this course students are able to:

• demonstrate knowledge of key concepts and theories of leadership in the public and political domain;
• apply these concepts and theories to analyse leadership behaviours and processes exhibited by public and political leaders in practice;
• describe and evaluate the leadership of public and political leadership based on key concepts and theories;
• evaluate the quality of public and political leadership exhibited in practice and use this to formulate evidence-based policy advice;

Content

This course is about an omnipresent yet curiously ill-understood phenomenon in the political and (semi)public domain: leadership. Calls for better, stronger, more authentic, more ethical public and political leadership are often heard these days – as indeed they have been through the ages.
But what does it mean when people say they want “good” leadership? What place can leadership have in a democracy? How is its exercise being facilitated and constrained by the institutions of democracy, the rule of law and public opinion? How do people who occupy senior public offices exercise leadership and how can leadership be exercised by those who don’t? And how can school leaders or those in health care provide good leadership amidst political scrutiny, limited public resources and ever-changing public policies?

Through discussing the literature, watching and analysing episodes of political drama series and documentaries, case studies, meetings with practitioners we explore how we can systematically understand and evaluate various forms of public and political leadership, and perhaps even think intelligently about how leadership might be improved.

The course will consist of two parts: a theoretical part and a practice based part. In the theoretical part (week 1 – 4), prominent concepts and theories regarding public and political leadership will be discussed, using state-of-the-art literature, cases and examples. We use the meetings primarily to (critically) reflect on and discuss the literature, not to provide a summary. It is therefore vital that you do the reading and coursework before class and actively participate in the meetings. We will end this part with a written mid-term exam.
In the practice based part (week 5 – 8), you will work on developing a framework based on theories and concepts, which can be used to describe and evaluate public and political leadership. In addition, several guest speakers will share their knowledge and experience with us. YOu will use your own developed evaluative framework to evaluate a public or political leader in practice.

The testing will consist of an exam and a research paper. In the mid-term exam, the learning objectives will be related to knowledge of key concepts and theories of the course. In the research paper you will write in duo’s, the learning objectives related to the application of these concepts and theories will be tested.

Note for exchange students
Resits may be scheduled after the end of the teaching period. Please consider this when planning your departure from the Netherlands. If in doubt, please ask the course coordinator when the resit is scheduled.