Leadership in democracy

by Paul Brooker

Leadership in Democracy develops and applies an innovative leadership theory of democracy and political evolution, based upon Schumpeter's famous theories of democracy and economic entrepreneurship. The first part of the book develops a Schumpeterian theory of democracy that views leadership as an essential component of democracy and its evolutionary political processes. Leadership in democracy normally involves only an adaptive, incremental response to change but it can also take the form of an adaptive innovation, a creative response, or a pioneering leader's entrepreneurial-style initiative and innovation. In the second part of the book this theory is applied to the US and British democracies in an assessment of how much entrepreneurial-style, pioneering leadership occurred during the 1960s-1990s in the electoral, governmental, legislative, administrative and policy-advocacy sectors of democracies. The assessment leads on to a wide-ranging appraisal of the prospects for 'entrepreneu