The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) developed by Bennister, ‘t Hart, and Worthy (2012) is conceptualized as the sum of skills capital, relational capital, and reputational capital. This conceptualization of leadership capital shows a resemblance to the traits leaders need to have to be considered credible. Credibility entails the judgments of a receiver (e.g. an authorizing environment) about the believability of a speaker. Credibility is thus a relational concept and it is up to audiences to attribute credibility to political leaders.
Based on the current knowledge about credibility it can be argued that it is skills and relations combined that leads to a favorable reputation. From the 1950s onwards research shows that credible speakers are competent, trustworthy, and caring for their audience (McCroskey & Teven, 1999; O’Keefe, 1990). What remains underexplored, however, is what it is that convinces audiences of their leaders’ competence, caring, and trustworthiness.
Therefore, in this paper focus is on political leaders performing in the media for an audience of citizens and the following question is addressed: How can it be understood from political leaders’ performances that citizens attribute a lot of credibility to some leaders and only little credibility to other leaders? To answer this question, two leaders with a contrasting credibility development during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2010 are analyzed: Job Cohen and Mark Rutte.
As such this paper extends the applicability of the LCI by looking beyond the ‘projected’ traits (Bennister et al, 2012:5) to how leaders actually perform. Additionally, this paper contributes to the LCI in exploring how the three capitals relate to one another. The operationalization of leadership capital suggests that skills, relations, and reputation are independent of each other, but in this paper it is scrutinized if and how this is the case when taking credibility as a starting point.
