ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION 1 Political Leadership in Context Joseph Masciulli, Mikhail A. Molchanov and W. Andy Knight Research in political science is mostly problem-driven (george and Bennet 2005; see Shapiro 2007, who convincingly opposes a method-driven approach). Among the many issues that political science deals with, the problem of leadership clearly stands out. Leadership is an essential feature of all government and governance: weak leadership contributes to government failures, and strong leadership is indispensable if the government is to succeed. Wise leadership secures prosperity in the long run; foolhardy leadership may bring about a catastrophe. The lack of leadership routinizes governance. Its political and creative aspects fade away: it becomes no diferent from administration, focusing solely on patern maintenance and repetition of the same. On the other hand, over-assertive leadership pays litle atention to institutional constraints: it may bring about sudden, unexpected changes, and disrupt the normal low of the political process, thus detracting from its transparency and/or predictability. Political leadership and followership account for signiicant diferences across and within individual nation states in responding to both newer global problems and traditional governance issues. globalization creates the demand for new forms of international and supranational leadership: as a ‘package of transnational lows of people, production, investment, information, ideas, and authority’ (Brysk 2002, 1; cf. Masciulli and day 2006), globalization elevates the signiicance of leadership of international organizations, regional groups of states, and global agencies (Masciulli and day 2006; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Leadership is a historically concrete phenomenon; that is, its structures and methods change with the passage of time. To inluence events and afect outcomes, leaders need to be prepared to abandon policy instruments and ideas that no longer work in a new environment. They need to be able to embrace the new and re- evaluate the old, even some of the earlier discarded ideas and methods of adapting to environments, if the circumstances call for it. Contributors to this book atempt to demonstrate in various ways that strategic-tactical innovative adaptation is the key to efective political leadership in a diverse set of regime types and cultural contexts. Innovations may take diferent forms, however. Though all of our authors are generally commited to democracy, human rights and environmental sustainability, we do not entirely agree on what these ideals mean theoretically and imply practically.