Developing Political Leaders and the Public

Abstract

This chapter explores how political leadership can develop to integrate public input, and how the public can develop to offer high-quality public input of value to political leaders. Although there have been significant changes in the leaders’ environment which impact on how politicians can lead, as discussed in Chapter 2, there is little research on what politicians are supposed to do in a context of expanded public input in government. Nevertheless, this chapter combines a range of literature that discusses new concepts of leadership and interviews with practitioners to put forward a number of key principles for how political leadership and the public will evolve in an era of integrated public input. It then presents hypotheses for how the public, political leaders and the process of public input might develop, summarising the findings of this chapter and Chapters 4 and 5.