Theresa May’s Leadership in Brexit Negotiations

Abstract

Theresa May entered the scene as prime minister at a moment of multiple crises. Her task was to implement the Brexit agenda after the outcome of the Brexit referendum, while at the same time facing deep divisions in her party and a political crisis in her country. While one could easily jump to the conclusion that Theresa May’s leadership in the Brexit process is a story of outright failure, this contribution combines insights from gender and leadership studies to offer a more nuanced view. It seeks to shed light on the type of leadership that can be attributed to Theresa May in the Brexit negotiations with regard both to how she positioned herself as a leader and how she was perceived. In order to address these two dimensions, we conduct computer-assisted analysis of a corpus composed of May’s speeches on Brexit and media coverage in the UK and Germany. We find that the glass cliff metaphor is helpful to understand the type of leadership scenario May had to cope with. We argue that gender provides a crucial lens for understanding the ways in which Theresa May constructed her leadership and how her leadership performance was evaluated in the media.