The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation

by Torun Dewan and David P Myatt.

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American Political Science Review, 102(3), pp. 351–368, August 2008.

Abstract: What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader’s influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders, they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing.

In their Notes from the Editor section of the August 2008 issue of the APSR, the co-editors summarized the paper:

If party competition is important, of course, so too is party leadership, and this is the problem taken up by Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt in “The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation.” Making public statements is doubtless one of the defining characteristics of a political leader. But to which leaders will people pay attention? To explore this question, the authors introduce a model in which leaders vary in how correct they are about policy and also in how precisely they can state that policy in their public statements. Their audience cares about the right policy but also about unity: Each person wants every other person as much as possible to support the same or similar policy. A public who cares mainly about unity might thus listen to a leader who states his policy clearly even though it could very well be wrong. A public who cares mainly about the correct policy would rather listen to a less clear but more correct leader. One interesting implication of their model is that if a leader wants to get as much public attention as possible, and not cede her audience to other leaders, the leader might purposefully obfuscate and make her public statements less clear, so that the audience would be compelled to spend more time figuring out what she is saying.