2. The Neglected Problem of Democratic Leadership

Australia is usually regarded as one of the most democratic of countries. One of the signs of this is said to be the permanent, seemingly entrenched scepticism of Australians about politics in general and especially about the politicians they elect to lead them. Polls regularly show a curious disjunction between approval ratings for the political system itself, which are always high, and those for the politicians who inhabit it, which are invariably much lower. More than sceptical, Australians are often downright cynical about the motives and actions of their political leaders, even when they support the leader’s party. If hope is occasionally vested in new leadership it is always subject to the lingering fear, or even expectation, that hope will inevitably be betrayed, sooner rather than later.

It is a mistake to think, however, that this is a peculiarly Australian phenomenon rather than a general feature of democratic government. The core animating principle of democracy is popular sovereignty, the idea that the people should rule. Yet democratic leaders inevitably exercise far more authority than ordinary citizens. This creates a permanent tension between the democratic leader and the sovereign people that engenders the kind of suspicion of leadership noted above. The fact that this tension is, in principle, irresolvable (as we would claim) gives democratic leadership its special character, explaining both its remarkable strengths and acknowledged weaknesses. Democratic leadership is, indeed, uniquely challenging because it must be most carefully exercised under conditions of peculiar constraint and constant distrust.

This is an important subject inadequately addressed in the scholarship. Indeed, the problem of democratic leadership constitutes a permanent blind spot for most modern students of democracy. Whole volumes dedicated to an appraisal of the state of democratic theory contain hardly a reference to the question (Held 1993; 1996; Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón 1999; Carter and Stokes 2002). Nor does it appear as a major (or even minor) theme in university teaching, at least according to a 2003 survey of American classes by Ronald Terchek (2003). Despite the modern flood of literature on leadership generally, the problem of specifically democratic leadership seldom appears. We argue that this strange silence is in fact symptomatic of the ambiguous place that leadership occupies in a democracy, being both essential to democratic government yet finding no secure justification within a theory resting on the concept of popular sovereignty.

With regard to this central ambiguity we may discern two fundamentally opposed tendencies. So-called elitist theorists resolve it in favour of leadership at the expense of popular sovereignty. The most famous formulation of their position asserts that oligarchic rule is an ‘iron law’ of politics. More democratically-inclined scholars, on the other hand, have reacted to the elitist challenge by trying to resolve the tension in favour of popular sovereignty. They do not so much solve the problem of democratic leadership as pass it over in embarrassed silence, typically pursuing more ideally ‘democratic’ political forms that envisage wider or even universal citizen participation in political processes and decisions. These strategies implicitly eschew the need for leadership altogether. A few scholars accept the importance of democratic leadership while recognising the tension between leadership and popular sovereignty, but they cannot resist the temptation to resolve it by prescriptively defining a type of leader who might guarantee good leadership while not betraying the promise of popular sovereignty.^[1]

The present scholarship on democratic leadership is deficient precisely because it is unwilling to contemplate the possibility that the tension between leadership and popular sovereignty is incapable of resolution. We claim that this is not a political problem to be overcome but rather a theoretically invaluable starting point for understanding both the unique authority of democratic leaders and the perennial challenges they face. We have no space to pursue that argument here, but will clear the way for such a study by addressing the curious poverty of contemporary theoretical studies of democratic leadership.