Introduction: leadership capital and the study of executive leadership in established democracies

After decades of widespread ignorance, leadership issues have prominently reentered international political science. While the scepticism among political scientists about reductionist approaches that focus on the ‘great man’ is perhaps greater than ever, there has been a growing realization that any ‘realist’ understanding of real world politics cannot afford to ignore agency. The reservations about the ‘great man’ paradigm (see Haslam et al., Reference Haslam, Reicher and Platow2011) in contemporary political science are manifold: One prominent objection relates to the gender aspect and has given rise to feminist equivalents of the concept which have, however, come to face similar criticism as the concept’s original brand (see Pittinsky et al., Reference Pittinsky, Bacon and Welle2007). A second reservation relates to the under-complexity of notions of ‘great man leadership’, which ignores the fact that leadership is a special kind of relationship which, by definition, involves leaders and followers (see Burns, 1978: 452). That there is no leadership without followership, and that followers may be just as important as leaders, has come to be fully realized only more recently (see Kellerman, Reference Kellerman2008). This analytical critique has resonated in particular with scholars focusing more specifically on democratic political leadership who, while being unhappy about describing citizens as followers, emphasize the dependence of democratic leaders on democratic support and supporters (see e.g. Kane and Patapan, 2012). A third objection against the ‘great man’ approach to the study of leadership, comes from scholars pointing to the pre-eminence of context which leaves little room for individual actors to make much of a difference. This position could in fact be described as the mainstream position in comparative politics, which is careful not to overemphasize the role of individuals, if only because individual actors are too small an entity to allow broader comparative assessments across political systems, or at least ‘may make understanding differences among political systems more difficult’ (see Peters, Reference Peters2014: 41).

In some important contributions that preceded the powerful return of leadership studies in political science a decade or so ago, attempts were made to overcome the shortcomings of the ‘great man’ approach by making a case for ‘interactionist’ approaches (see, e.g. Elgie, Reference Elgie1995). This marked a major achievement as it both helped to overcome the fixation with individual leaders and avoided any deterministic assumptions about the effects of contextual factors. At the same time, variations of ‘interactionism’ in political leadership research did not really amount to a clear-cut conceptual approach. In this complex and contested context of political leadership research, the recently devised concept of leadership capital by Mark Bennister, Paul ‘t Hart and Ben Worthy (see Bennister et al., Reference Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy2014) marks an important novel approach that is committed to increasing the analytical rigor in assessing, and understanding, the performance of political leaders.

The concept of leadership capital sticks to the established notion that leadership is a behavioural concept, that leaders have different resources, and that all potential leaders act in context. In contrast to many other recently developed approaches to studying leadership that seek to include the performance of informal leaders, the leadership capital concept consciously focuses on holders of high political office. In fact, one of the obvious goals of the concept relates to differentiating between office-holding and exercising leadership. This differentiation is also, and in particular, important for distinguishing between more general conceptions of ‘political capital’, as developed by Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1986) and others, and the more specific subject of ‘leadership capital’. Political capital is usually understood as an enabling resource that different political actors can possess to differing degrees. By contrast, leadership capital, as conceptualized by Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy, is more specifically ‘focused on how constituents confer authority on a particular office-holder who then uses it’ (Bennister et al., Reference Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy2014). Whereas political capital is usually needed to win high political office, leadership capital is essentially ‘performative capital’ (Bennister et al., Reference Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy2014) which is used once a political actor has secured a formal leadership position.

Following in the steps of Bourdieu’s influential reflections about the defining features and constituent elements of political capital, Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy conceive of leadership capital as the aggregate of a leader’s skills, relations and reputation. While the centrepiece of this article is an application of this leadership capital concept for a case study on the Federal Republic of Germany, with a special focus on the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a brief appraisal of these three elements in the context of recent leadership research would not seem to go amiss.

There are few contributions to the study of political leadership that fail to acknowledge the significance of leadership skills for the performance of political leaders. In fact, to the extent that leadership is conceived of as a special activity in terms of a leader’s ability to identify goals, to mobilize support, and to bring about substantive change (see Keohane, Reference Keohane2010), skills that enable a leader to perform these different tasks are widely considered to mark a sine qua non of successful leadership. Needless to say, in order to make a real difference more specific skills have to match the particular context in which they are employed (Bell et al., Reference Bell, Hargrove and Theakston1999). In this regard it does not matter so much if such skills are considered as those that are acquired by experience and learning, or rather as flowing directly from a leader’s personality.

The prominent emphasis of relations in the ‘leadership capital’ concept is not only in line with the dominant trend in international leadership research towards understanding leadership explicitly as a relationship (see above), it also corresponds with relatively recent conceptual ideas in the field of executive studies, in particular, with the core executive concept which originally emerged as a conceptual response to the prime ministerial vs. cabinet government debate in British politics (Dunleavy and Rhodes, Reference Dunleavy and Rhodes1990). To advocates of the core executive concept, power is not firmly attached to any particular institution or structure; it is essentially contingent and relational (see Elgie, Reference Elgie2011: 66, 69). The concept’s focus on relations also echoes a strong trend in recent leadership research that is sceptical about any notion of leadership by an individual actor, and which stresses the need to conceive of leadership as something that is more often than not performed by a group of actors (see Brown, Reference Brown2014).

The special acknowledgment of a leader’s reputation as a crucial factor shaping his or her political opportunity structure, links the concept of leadership capital to the burgeoning debate about the ever growing mediatization and personalization of politics and political leadership (see, e.g. Blondel et al., Reference Blondel, Thiébault, Czernicka, Inoguchi, Pathmanand and Venturino2009; Garzia, Reference Garzia2014; Esser and Strömbäck, Reference Esser and Strömbäck2014). Contemporary leaders are constantly monitored and assessed by the media and by citizens using the mass media as their main source of information about politics. Leaders and their leadership performance have come to be judged on complex sets of criteria – including responsibility, responsiveness, effectiveness, and authenticity – at least some of which are in obvious tension with each other (see Helms, Reference Helms2012). Such judgments are reflected in the varying amounts of public trust in, and support for, a given leader, which have an independent impact on what leaders can do and accomplish, as other political actors tend to be more generous in dealing with leaders who enjoy broad public trust and support. As Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy note, alongside a leader’s perceived authenticity and effectiveness, the match or mismatch between promise and performance in terms of public policy is at the very core of the reputational dimension of leadership capital. This corresponds with recent research on expectation setting by political leaders and patterns of retrospective voting which suggests that ‘setting high expectations incurs a cost in public support if the projected outcome is not attained’, at least ‘in domains in which voters attribute to the leader either practical or theoretical authority’ (Malhotra and Margalit, Reference Malhotra and Margalit2014: 1000, 1015).Footnote ¹

Unlike several other recent concepts of political leadership, the leadership capital concept is firmly based on the experience of real world politics: It starts from the important observation that political leadership is not only invariably highly dynamic and contingent but that there is, more specifically, a ‘natural trajectory’ of leadership capital depreciation over time. With that, the concept acknowledges both the uniqueness of any leader, and any leadership performance, and the existence of more general patterns and dynamics of political leadership in representative democracies.

A more specific element of Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy’s study, is a so-called ‘leadership capital index’ that seeks to produce more nuanced assessments of a leader’s performance or, in the terms of the leadership capital concept, of the development of his or her ‘stock’ of authority (see Bennister et al., Reference Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy2014). As the authors suggest, the three key components of leadership capital (skills, relations, and reputation) can be related to different criteria and indicators as well as measurement scales, including hard and soft empirical measures, on which different leaders can score differently. The leadership capital index is designed as a diagnostic ‘checklist’ tool, which can provide substantive snap shots of a given leader’s performance, easily extendable to a larger series of assessments, which then brings into perspective the invariably dynamic nature of a leader’s tenure, or even allows comparative assessments of different leaders across time and space. The scores and assessments to be made on the basis of this index may be prone to a certain amount of pseudo exactness, but the index still marks a valuable element of the larger concept which may help scholars to avoid sweeping judgements.

The analysis offered below starts from the premise that the context in which leaders operate is somewhat less volatile and dynamic than the emphasis on skills, relations and reputation in the leadership capital concept would appear to suggest. At least in the established liberal democracies, political leaders do not normally operate under chaotic circumstances but in the context of more or less firmly institutionalized environments. Political institutions mark a relatively stable element of the wider leadership context. They create a set of particular incentives and constraints for actors whose impact can be identified across the tenures of different political leaders within that system (see Elgie, Reference Elgie2012; Helms Reference Helms2014a). It seems reasonable to suggest that the institutional parameters of a given system not only provide a distinctive opportunity structure for exercising political leadership but that the institutional features of a given regime also shape the politics of leadership capital accumulation and spending more specifically.

While there is as yet no substantive comparative study focusing specifically on the politics of leadership capital in parliamentary and presidential democracies, it would seem reasonable to expect some of the key institutional differences between the two types of governmental system – such as the election mode and fixed-term of presidents, or the structural and functional integration of the head of government and head of state in the office of president – to have a major and distinctive impact on how leadership capital is typically gained and lost. One very obvious difference relates to the electoral costs of governing: while governments in parliamentary democracies tend to see their electoral support shrinking with every re-election, US presidents, if having been reelected, usually start their second term with a significantly expanded electoral support base. At the same time, mid-term elections in presidential democracies are just as much welcome occasions to punish the president as regional or state elections tend to mark symbolic or real setbacks for the national government in compound parliamentary democracies (see Helms, Reference Helms2014b: 65, note 6). Similarly, the calculations relating to leadership capital accumulation and spending of ‘governing presidents’ in semi-presidential systems, such as the Fifth French Republic, must be expected to be structurally different from those of prime ministers in pure parliamentary democracies such as the United Kingdom, largely irrespective of other contextual factors. For example, the opportunity to make a fresh start, and acquire at least some fresh political capital, by exchanging the prime minister to overcome a present crisis is a valuable presidential resource in many semi-presidential regimes that finds no full equivalent in an purely parliamentary democracy. The somewhat brutal replacement of Jean-Marc Ayrault by Manuel Valls in the Hôtel Matignon, that President Hollande ordered in a desperate attempt to overcome the ignominious defeat of his party in the March 2014 regional elections, provides a recent case in point.

The focus of this article is on another institutional difference between democratic political systems that relates more generally to the degree of institutional complexity. This dimension has inspired different proposals in the conceptual debate about different types of democracy, including Arend Lijphart’s famous distinction between Westminster and consensus democracies (Lijphart, Reference Lijphart1984, Reference Lijphart2012). Even more to the point is Vivian Schmidt’s distinction between simple polities ‘in which governing activity has traditionally been channeled through a single authority’, and compound polities ‘in which activity has traditionally been more diffused through multiple authorities’ (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2005: 761). The latter tend to ‘diffuse power and authority through federal or regionalized institutional structures and permit a moderate level of interest access and influence through corporatist policy making …. They also promote compromise-oriented politics through proportional systems of representation, and strive for consensus despite partisan patterns of voting and exercising voice’ (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2005: 763). From this conceptual perspective, the Federal Republic is easily recognized as a compound democracy.

While the power of institutions is rarely disputed in contemporary political science, ‘enlightened institutionalists’ are happy to emphasize that institutions do not determine the behavior of actors and the interaction of different actors. Nor do institutions account for everything that constitutes the wider context in which leaders operate. The context that surrounds leaders includes other variables that stand out for their longevity and persistence, such as and in particular, the political culture of a given polity. Institutions and political culture do not coexist in isolation from each other but are interrelated and interdependent, especially with regard to their effects on political leadership (see Brown, Reference Brown2014: 42–48).Footnote ² Alongside these more or less stable contextual factors, particular contexts of political leadership are shaped by a wealth of different circumstantial factors, many of which are by definition much more short-lived, volatile and contingent. It is in particular the uncertain impact of circumstances and events that has largely undermined attempts at developing more coherent theories of political leadership. Most leadership scholars agree there is no leadership strategy and style for all seasons, not even within a particular country, and that effective leaders will be identified by their willingness and ability to make the best of the prevailing circumstances.

The next section seeks to identify the written and unwritten rules that shape the politics of leadership capital in Germany, and to distil some of the features that distinguish the conditions for leadership, and dealing with leadership capital, in compound and simple polities. As the inventors of the leadership capital concept illustrate their approach with a case study of a British prime minister (see Bennister et al., Reference Bennister, ‘t Hart and Worthy2014), developing a complementary perspective would appear worthwhile and important. The second part of this article takes a closer look at the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl (1982–98) whose exceptional longevity offers a particularly tempting opportunity to apply the leadership capital concept to the German case.

The politics of leadership capital in a compound democracy

The acquisition of leadership capital effectively starts with the way leaders win office. In compound polities such as Germany, the way to the top position of chief executive at the national level is less straightforward than in more power-concentrating simple polities. In contrast to the established patterns of recruitment in the United Kingdom, where prime ministers emerge from the House of Commons and as official leaders of the strongest party in the House, the recruitment pool for German chancellors is considerably wider. There is neither a constitutional requirement of candidates holding a seat in the Bundestag nor being the official leader of the strongest party. In fact, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel were the only chancellors that won the chancellorship as incumbent opposition and party leaders in the Bundestag. All other chancellors following the ‘founding chancellor’, Konrad Adenauer, lacked any experience as parliamentary opposition leader at the national level, or were not even the leader of their party. The first thing to mention, therefore, is that high-profile parliamentary experience as opposition leader is usually not a key component of the political capital of newly incoming chancellors, which might be taken as an indicator that parliamentary experience may be of limited use.Footnote ³

The functional equivalent to a national parliamentary career in the German multi-level parliamentary regime is a political career in one of the states, or at least when it comes to recruiting candidates for the chancellorship. While the state level has emerged as a political arena in its own right with limited cross-level movement (Stolz and Borchert, Reference Stolz and Borchert2011), the top leadership position at state level has in fact served as an important springboard to the chancellorship. Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Gerhard Schröder were two chancellors who won their national office as sitting minister-presidents, and two others (Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl) gathered extensive experience as minister-presidents before entering the national political arena. It is not clear, however, what exactly the experience as minister-president means in terms of leadership capital: Experience in directing a state government certainly marks a valuable resource both in terms of skills and reputation (or at least public recognition), but it may well be that the contacts and relationships developed as minister-president are of similar relevance. At least, the intense cooperation of the states within the federation and the close functional integration of the state and federal levels provide excellent opportunities for establishing a wealth of contacts and relations.

The multi-level structure of the German governmental system has several other consequences for the politics of leadership capital in the Federal Republic. First, those who make it to the chancellery are likely to face the competition of the minister-presidents who may spoil careful calculations of leadership capital accumulation. Popular minister-presidents from the opposition party may strengthen the public appeal of the opposition at the national level, and provide them with valuable administrative support. The existence of powerful minister-presidents from the ranks of the chancellor’s party means that a number of well-known and reasonably experienced contenders for the chancellorship, who cannot be politically kept in check by the means of collective ministerial responsibility, are always around. Even in the absence of any ambitions to challenge the chancellor, their very existence represents a force to be reckoned with. Some minister-presidents may provide a challenge to the chancellor just by their successful leadership performance in their home state which may prompt unfavourable comparisons, in particular if things are not going well at the national level. Further, minister-presidents normally have a strong power base within their state party which, given the genuinely federal structure of the German parties, may play a major role in the intra-party politics at the national level, and constrain the chancellor’s room for manoeuvre. As in most other parliamentary democracies, support from his or her own party arguably marks the chancellor’s single most important resource, but in contrast to the heads of government in many other West European democracies, German chancellors are, to a lesser extent, the ‘natural’ and uncontested leaders of their respective parties.

However, the power of the minister-presidents is not exclusively played out at the level of intra-party politics. The standing orders of the Bundestag allow the minister-presidents to attend the meetings of the Bundestag, and to speak any time. In particular, the peculiar construction of the German federal system, with the second chamber, the Bundesrat, being staffed by the state governments, provides the minister-presidents with a tremendous veto and bargaining power via the second chamber. While the distribution of power between the parties is a major factor in explaining patterns of decision making between the Bundestag and Bundesrat (see Burckhart, Reference Burckhart2008), the overall trend since German unification has clearly been towards an increase in the independent power of the minister-presidents towards their national party organization and the federal government (Krumrey et al., Reference Krumrey, Haerder and Schlesinger2013). Even rare spells of ‘unified government’ are no longer a blank sheet for the federal government, if they have ever been (see Sturm, Reference Sturm2002). This notwithstanding, federal governments have good reason to hope for benign majorities in the Bundesrat. Generally, longitudinal analyses suggest that federal governments are likely to see their power base at state level shrink continuously (Burckhart, Reference Burckhart2008: 193). And even though the exact degree to which state elections are shaped by national politics is unknown, and the impact of the federal government’s performance may in fact be more limited than widely assumed (see Gabriel and Völkl, Reference Gabriel and Völkl2009), federal governments do have to pay their share of the bill if things go wrong, as it is their leverage that is potentially being constrained.

Some of the features that mark the conditions of leadership ascendency in the Federal Republic also have an impact on what factors count, and how much, in terms of leadership capital accumulation by an incumbent chancellor. To begin with, the modest relevance of parliamentary leadership experience for winning the chancellorship corresponds to the limited importance of the performance of chancellors in parliament for building up political reputation and leadership capital. While prime ministers in Westminster systems tend to win or lose public popularity depending on their performance in parliament, particularly at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the position of German chancellors in the Bundestag is considerably less exposed, with less at stake in terms of winning or losing leadership capital.

Although enjoying the support of one’s own party is an indispensable power resource for any chancellor, securing the formal position of party leader has not been considered a necessary element in building up the greatest possible political capital. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, widely admired as one the most competent and effective chancellors of the Federal Republic, never held the leadership of his party, and both Chancellors Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Georg Kiesinger accepted the CDU party leadership only reluctantly. Even more spectacularly, in 2004 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder resigned from the office of SPD party leader – in order to be better able to concentrate on the office of chancellor, or so his official explanation read. However, at least Schröder’s experience would appear to suggest that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to protect the chancellor’s leadership capital by letting a separate party leader take the heat for the party’s frustrations with the government. While there have been more convincing examples of ‘shared leadership’ at the party, parliamentary and executive levels – such as the famous SPD ‘troika’ of the 1970s – overall, securing both leadership offices and making calculated use of them in addressing different political audiences seems to mark a more effective strategy of accumulating and protecting leadership capital (see Helms, Reference Helms2005: Ch. 7).

Because of the strength of the German parties in the recruitment and governing process, chancellors do not necessarily have to be exceptionally popular with the public and the media to survive in office for an extended period of time. Strong party support, and a reasonable amount of appreciation between coalition partners, can largely compensate for a moderate public popularity of the chancellor. Vice versa, chancellors that were not naturally born party leaders, and were more contested within their own party, had to compensate by strong personal popularity, as was the case with Chancellors Erhard and Schmidt. However, Rudolf Wildenmann has aptly characterized both of them as ‘charismatic losers’, unable to fully neutralize the inherent constraints of party government for very long (see Wildenmann, Reference Wildenmann1986).

That said, personal popularity is no doubt a valuable resource for the chancellor, as it helps to transform office-related authority into political power. Other things being equal, a chancellor enjoying public popularity and strong support from his or her party will be better off than a less popular chancellor enjoying a similar amount of support of his or her party. Also, an actor’s public popularity has to be defined in relation to the popularity of other actors. Even popular chancellors can face other players that are possibly even more popular than themselves. Those contenders for public popularity can be either members of the government or the opposition. While fellow ministers enjoying an exceptional popularity would appear to have a less damaging effect on the chancellor’s room for maneuver than hugely popular opposition leaders, even popular ministers can effectively constrain the chancellor. At the same time, public popularity is not a zero-sum game: Highly popular foreign ministers have not precluded a prominent role of the chancellor in foreign policy. Indeed, the personal achievements of Chancellors Schmidt and Kohl – who both employed the exceptionally influential Hans-Dietrich Genscher as foreign minister – largely centred on the field of foreign rather than domestic policy. Also Chancellor Schröder’s role in foreign policy has by no means been completely overshadowed by the exceptional public popularity of his Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (see Maull, Reference Maull2006: 434–435).

Given the particular institutional features of the German political system, special communicative skills are not a necessary precondition for effective leadership capital accumulation. In fact, in Vivian Schmidt’s conceptualization of ‘compound democracy’ the particular structure of communication in institutionally complex democracies – from which the requirements of communicating effectively in such a type of democracy can be reduced – is at the very centre. As Schmidt argues, the coordinative discourse (among policy actors) in compound democracies is elaborate and the communicative discourse (among political discourse) thin. Given the dispersion of power, widespread interest consultation, and consensus-oriented politics, leaders tend to communicate with the general public only in vague terms, since detailed discussion risks unraveling complex compromises reached in private (see Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2005: 773–775).

The chancellorship of Angela Merkel demonstrates impressively that political leaders in compound democracies may live well and secure even in the absence of rhetorical mastery. While British observers are right to point out that arguably no British prime minister would get away for very long with Merkel’s public leadership approach (Butler, Reference Butler2013), the chancellor’s inclination to wait long before entering the public debate, and then usually taking the position of the emerging majority on an issue worked reasonably well in the German context. However, even many observers accustomed to the ‘un-British’ rhetoric of German politics found Merkel’s public leadership approach deficient, or at least notably focused on defending the chancellor’s power status rather than on providing vigorous leadership in a complex environment (see Helms, Reference Helms2014b: 61–62).

The experience of Chancellor Schröder’s infamous ‘Agenda 2010’Footnote ⁴ underscores the uncertain role of effective communication in the German context: While the unlikely success in overcoming the entrenched reservations about sweeping political innovation seems to suggest that Schröder had the ‘vision thing’ and made effective use of suitable ‘reform rhetorics’, a careful analysis of the decision-making process reveals that several other factors – such as in particular the weakening of German corporatism – were more important in making the ‘Agenda’ happen (see Freier, Reference Freier2008; Fleckenstein, Reference Fleckenstein2008). Indeed, the public leadership performance of the chancellor and other senior members of the federal executive surrounding these wide-ranging labour relations and welfare state reforms tends to be considered by many as a glaring example of a ‘communication malaise’ (see Gaste, Reference Gasde2006; Delhees et al., Reference Delhees, Korte, Schartau, Switek and Weissenbach2008: 133–135).

The ‘Agenda 2010’ case is instructive in another respect, too. It suggests that sometimes even spectacular leadership successes may be accomplished in the absence of much stored leadership capital. In the weeks before launching the ‘Agenda 2010’ in spring 2003 Schröder had in fact notably little leadership capital. His government had just won its second term by one of the slightest possible margins; more importantly, in the weeks following his re-election in late 2002, Schröder suffered ‘the swiftest decline in popularity of any postwar chancellor’ (Landler, Reference Landler2002). Therefore, the ‘Agenda 2010’, officially launched in March 2003, might be judged as an example of a major political venture ‘on credit’. While it eventually turned out to be successful in terms of reducing the unemployment rate, it used up the government’s remaining political capital and paid a reasonable political dividend only well after the Schröder government’s forced fall from power. After all, it is not really clear to what extent the ‘Agenda 2010’ initiative can be meaningfully described as an example of public policy investment on credit. As Bertelli and John have shown in the British context, governments tend to behave like investment managers ‘making choices that yield return through the public’s valuation of policies’ (Bertelli and John, Reference Bertelli and John2013: 741), which means, in particular, return in terms of electoral support for the government. While the authors explicitly acknowledge that there is room in public policy making for statecraft, which clearly implies more than just responding to public expectations, governments are generally believed to ‘carefully consider a policy’s risk profile and expected return’ (Bertelli and John, Reference Bertelli and John2013: 771). However, while being largely successful in retrospective (see Zohlnhöfer, Reference Zohlnhöfer2014), the ‘Agenda 2010’ was not a measure that could be expected to produce a substantive return within just a few months or years, as is perhaps true for many large-scale reform measures which take time to fully materialize. What comes as a major challenge to even the most sophisticated theories of public policy making under the conditions of party government is the fact that there may be conviction politicians committed to pursuing conviction policies – even at the possible expense of losing elections and office. Also, and perhaps more importantly in the context of the leadership capital debate, even though there certainly are ‘reputational cycles’ in democratic governance and leadership, some cycles close only well after the end of a leader’s tenure,Footnote ⁵ and thus do not provide the leader with reputational capital that could be used for new ventures.

One of the obvious beneficiaries of the ‘Agenda’ was Chancellor Merkel and her government taking over from Schröder in late 2005, as they could build on the deeply unpopular yet economically efficient ‘Agenda’ reforms. The political legacies that political leaders inherit from their successors and the politics of dealing with them would appear to mark a fascinating subject of research in its own right. Following in the steps of Stephen Skowronek and his seminal work on presidential leadership in political time (Skowronek, Reference Skowronek1993, Reference Skowronek2011),Footnote ⁶ other leadership scholars have begun to develop more than casual conceptualizations of political legacies (see, in particular, Rockman, Reference Rockman2008). However, the issue is still to be connected with the concept of leadership capital. What is clear is that, in terms of leadership capital, leaders can start their incumbency with a heavy mortgage on their account, for which they are not really responsible. Many inherited burdens may relate to a heavy public debt, or to seriously delayed reforms. However, leaders may also experience particular burdens and constraints in terms of public expectations. A new leader’s status as a public figure, and his or her influence as a political leader, may suffer if he or she compares unfavourably with his or her successor in terms of media performance in the eyes of the public, even if a change in the public leadership approach marks a deliberate choice rather than an incident to be explained by a lack of skill (see Langer, Reference Langer2010). Thus, as Robert Hargrove, a former director of the Harvard Leadership Research Project, suggests, for a newly incoming leader building up political and leadership capital may be crucially about breaking away from their predecessors’ legacies: ‘One of the things leaders need to do in their first 100 days beside come up with a vision and game plan is to look for openings to make an immediate difference that will help build political capital’ (Hargrove, Reference Hargrove2014).

Stepping out of the shadows of their predecessors seems in fact to be what most leaders aspire to, if consciously or perhaps more instinctively. However, it may well be that, if looked at from a comparative perspective, compound democracies are marked by particularly ‘sticky legacies’, and some actors may take this into account when building their leadership agenda. For example, when challenging Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1998 Bundestag election, Gerhard Schröder and his party famously launched the campaign slogan, ‘we don’t want to change everything but to do many things better’.

One final important aspect of the politics of leadership capital in the context of a compound democracy relates to the dispersed power structure at the very heart of the political executive. As in other compound democracies, executive leadership in Germany takes places under the conditions of coalition government. With reference to the concept of leadership capital, coalition management by the head of government clearly relates to the analytical categories of skill and relations. In order to build up leadership capital, chancellors must be reasonably skillful in managing the relationship between the coalition parties. Again, however, these skills must be considered in context: While all chancellors had to cope with the challenges of coalition government, the coalitions they chaired were of a fundamentally different character. Most scholars agree that the single most important distinction relates to ‘small coalitions’ (with just one of the major parties, CDU or SPD participating), and ‘grand coalitions’ between the two major players. Grand coalitions are widely considered to severely constrain the chancellor, though a comparative case study of Chancellors Kiesinger and Merkel, who both led grand coalitions, suggests that, after all, much depends on what resources a chancellor can bring to bear and how skillfully he or she operates (see Niclauss, Reference Niclauss2008). There are major differences between coalitions even within the category of ‘small coalitions’, though. Christian Democrats holding the chancellorship have had to cope not only with their official junior coalition partners but also with their Bavarian sister party, the CSU. Overall, a chancellor’s influence over CSU ministers, in particular his or her ability to fire them, tends be similarly constrained as it is towards ministers from any other coalition party. Moreover, the task of managing a coalition is not confined to chairing a cabinet composed of several parties. The degree to which a chancellor will be able to accumulate and spend leadership capital effectively will be strongly influenced by his or her ability to control the decision-making process in the more informal networks of coalition governance (Rudzio, Reference Rudzio2002, Reference Rudzio2008).

If the different points made above were to be developed into a set of more general propositions about the politics of leadership capital in simple and compound democracies, the following aspects would appear to be of special importance and well worth being examined further in a broader comparative inquiry:

Other things being equal, (1) the required skills of a would-be leader operating in the context of a compound democracy would have to be more in the field of cooperation and negotiation than in exercising ‘strong leadership’ and delivering polarizing partisan rhetoric. The ability to produce a grand consistent narrative and to provide skillful rhetorical leadership marks a more dispensable quality in compound polities than in simple polities. In fact, major rhetorical gestures that are not followed by political action may even work to undermine the credibility of a leader and damage his or her reputation, which is of course true for compound and simple polities, but institutionally significantly more likely to happen in the former.Footnote ⁷

(2) While the quality of relations to other important players matters in any regime, leaders in compound democracies are more likely to have more complex relations with a larger number of different actors at different levels of the system. These relations are also more likely to extend beyond a leader’s party, and the institutions politically controlled by that party, and well into the ranks of the political opposition. Relations between the leader and the public are of major importance in both simple and compound democracies, but in terms of authority and power they tend to be somewhat less central in the latter, or more specifically in compound parliamentary democracies (that is, in contrast to the situation in presidential compound democracies, such as the United States, where presidents invariably depend strongly on their public popularity). In compound parliamentary democracies with complex coalition governments, leaders who do not enjoy a particular amount of personal support among the public stand a comparatively better chance to win and keep office than their counterparts in simple polities, as long as they enjoy the support of the coalition parties.Footnote ⁸ While leaders operating under the conditions of coalition governance are not necessarily more durable in office than the leaders in simple politics with single-party governments, they tend to be less directly exposed to possible acts of electoral punishment.

(3) Finally, reputations, if understood to be shaped by a leader’s effectiveness and authenticity as well as his or her proven willingness and ability to deliver on political promises, tend to be more difficult to establish in compound democracies, because chief executives are institutionally more constrained than their counterparts in simple polities. For good or worse, leaders chairing complex coalition governments in compound democracies tend to have less control over the overall performance of the government than most leaders in simple democracies (which is even and perhaps particularly true for the presidential type of compound democracy if the government is understood to include both the executive and the legislative branch of government, as is the case in the United States). This may seem to make the accumulation of reputational capital for leaders in compound democracies both more difficult and possibly less rewarding. However, it remains an important empirical question if, or to what extent, leaders in compound democracies are actually being seen by their publics as having less control over the public policies that governments make. The growing mediatization and personalization of politics, which is not confined to power-concentrating simple polities, may lead citizens in compound democracies to underestimate the particular institutional and political constraints their leaders face which, as a consequence, may make it even more difficult for leaders in such contexts to effectively build reputational capital.

The remaining part of this paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the politics of leadership capital by looking in more detail at the political performance of one particular leader. It should be noted that the analysis of the Kohl chancellorship, offered below, aims at illustrating the analytical usefulness of the leadership capital concept and capturing the defining features of Kohl’s leadership performance rather than demonstrating that Kohl had more or less leadership capital, or was better or worse at using it, than other German chancellors or his foreign counterparts.

The leadership capital of Helmut Kohl

As the head of a CDU/CSU-FDP government (1982–98), that won four consecutive Bundestag elections, Helmut Kohl held the office of chancellor for a full 16 years. Remarkably, many scholars agree that, while public perceptions of Kohl’s leadership performance varied a lot over time, his leadership style remained in many regards ‘strikingly constant’ over the more than one-and-a-half decades of this tenure (Clemens, Reference Clemens1998a: 2; see also Schwarz, Reference Schwarz2012: 313). A more extensive evaluation of the relevant scholarly literature also reveals that one notable feature of the Kohl chancellorship was the great deal of ‘luck’ and ‘fortune’ that Helmut Kohl enjoyed throughout the years of his extended political career (see, e.g. Pulzer, Reference Pulzer1999; Langguth, Reference Langguth2009: 42, 95; Noack and Bickerich, Reference Noack and Bickerich2010: 42; Schwan and Steininger, Reference Schwan and Steininger2010: 89). Yet, this does not preclude an assessment of the performance of Chancellor Kohl as a political leader along the lines of the leadership capital approach, as fortunate developments, while being helpful, did not relieve Kohl from the responsibility to act. In a recent comparative study, Kohl has even been found to belong to the group of ‘redefining leaders’Footnote ⁹ – an assessment that may be challenged but which strongly suggests that it was by no means events alone that shaped the Kohl chancellorship.