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Recent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders’ rhetorical signals facilitate followers’ co-ordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article empirically demonstrates that followers react to informational signals from leaders. It further theorizes that leaders use a combination of informational and non-informational tools to solve the co-ordination problem. The findings show that a mixture of informational and non- informational tools shapes followers’ strategic calculi. Ignoring non-informational tools — and particularly the interrelationship between informational and non-informational tools - can threaten the internal validity of causal inference in the analysis of leadership effects on co-ordination.
Examining the careers of democratic heads of state and government from 1960–2010, we find that one in every seven turns to the private sector after office. Distinguishing between the factors that attract leaders to business and those that render leaders attractive, we find that the global CEO compensation rates, cultural norms, having served in office in Anglo-Saxon countries as well as their personal background, matter. We also find that certain economic outcomes and policies in office such as economic growth and reduction in state spending are often associated with post-tenure business careers. We do not find evidence, however, that leaders are able to implement policies with future careers in mind, which would in turn raise concerns over accountability.
Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how the UN GD corpus (UNGDC) can be used as a resource from which country positions on different policy dimensions can be derived using text analytic methods. The article provides applications of these estimates, demonstrating the contribution the UNGDC can make to the study of international politics.