WORLD VIEW:Innovative leadership is required to advance our values, craft a 'sense of us' and make us matter, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
‘THERE GO the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” So said Alexandre Ledru-Rollin during the French revolution of 1848, when he led a section of the working-class movement. It is an interesting way to frame the discussion of political reform in Ireland as we head into a general election in the middle of a deep economic and institutional crisis.
Recent Irish debates about institutional reform tend to counterpose political processes and political action, largely because it is assumed political leaders and the system they manage have lost public trust and legitimacy and must be renewed from below. Hence the recurrent lists of demands dealing with clientelism, accountability, freedom of information, Oireachtas reform, local democracy and citizens’ assemblies.
Valuable, indeed essential, in themselves, such changes need political action to put them into practice. While this is widely understood, such is the distrust of the existing political class that moves like this week’s commitments by the three major parties to abolish the Seanad are received cynically, in the belief that this would become a mere populist proxy for broader reforms by the new government. The Labour Party’s comprehensive and radical 140-point reform plan is a much more considered document which will not so easily be set aside in office; but it too needs substantial deliberation over a longer period than is possible in this election campaign.
Efforts to strengthen citizen participation and the role of civil society in our democracy are central demands for political reform. But how should this be done? Is their undoubted weakness to do with a deep- seated political culture of localism and deference, because of bad institutional design or do they reflect entrenched inequalities of class, power and wealth? There are no clear answers – hence the need for longer and more effective discussion. Citizens’ assemblies, deliberative polling, popular initiatives and more thorough political and media debate are required.
It should not be assumed they will eventually emerge in consensus form. Much of the political theorising behind citizen involvement is based on the “ideal speech situation” championed by philosophers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, in which deliberation is understood as non-coercive communication inducing informed reflection on preferences, values and interests. Critics say that this is at best a partial account, since it underestimates the roles of power, structural inequality, contradictory interests, bargaining, negotiation, majority voting and political parties in political change.
Thus conflicting conclusions will emerge from this debate requiring political choices. The Irish political system is in flux, perhaps on the verge of a major realignment, which gives a real opportunity to inject those choices. Even a very much strengthened civil society will need to play into that political realignment, which could throw up new social and political movements rather than channelling them into existing parties. Innovative leadership is required.
That’s where Ledru-Rollin comes in. Leadership is too often assumed to consist of some variant of the “great man” approach, involving checklists of individual characteristics such as intelligence, charisma, dominance, adaptability or persistence. In fact leaders are intimately connected to followers. Leadership is about getting people to want to do things, shaping their desires, beliefs and priorities, articulating and communicating their identities.
It should therefore be understood from the bottom up as well as the top down, from a rear as well as a forward position, as Ledru-Rollin saw.
In their just published fresh examination of the subject, The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power, Alexander Haslam, Stephen Reicher and Michael Platow make a strong case for understanding it in terms of social identity. Leadership is a process joining leaders and followers as members of the same in-group, usually counterposed to a different or hostile out-group. Leaders are normally “one of us”, advance our interests and values, craft a “sense of us” and make us matter by embedding the values and priorities of the group in reality.
In this light it is instructive to consider the shortcomings of existing political leadership in Ireland, whether partisan or national. The current popular frustration and disgust with politics flows from its perceived absence, contrasted with a pronounced willingness to become followers of some more authentic leadership. There is a yearning for more representative leaders capable of championing interests, shaping group identities and fashioning reality in their direction.
Ireland’s political volatility is not unique in Europe, as the numbers of strong identifiers with existing parties sharply declines; but it is distinctive in not as yet giving rise to a new right-wing anti-immigrant and Euro-sceptic populism comparable to the parties in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Denmark which express these values and are led by charismatic individuals. Such movements and leaders can go various and opposing ways, left and right, populist and liberal. Different types of leader – autocratic or participative, chairmen or chiefs – can emerge. This deserves close attention.