To which extent do crises shape the nature of political leadership? What impact do crises have on the behaviour and activity of political leaders? The paper discusses these questions by placing them into the context of analytical typologies formulated in the literature of political leadership. Political thinking has traditionally made a distinction between political leadership in normal circumstances and exceptional times. While in extraordinary situations ‘great leaders’ are needed and regarded legitimate, in normal times it is preferred to live under office-holders, administrator or managers. In post-1945 political science James MacGregor Burns (1978) set up an equivalent approach differentiating transactional and transformational leadership. A decade later in his seminal book Jean Blondel (1987) aimed to transcend this dichotomy by providing a more sophisticated typology of leadership. It gave a strong impetus to empirical research (e.g. Ludger Helms 2012). Although the author of this paper finds Blondel’s effort particularly fruitful, this paper turns back to the classical dichotomy. It argues that the dichotomy still has a strong heuristic value in conceptualizing contemporary politics. It also has a strong impact on the popular understanding of politics; the perception of a situation as a crisis does shape the expectations of citizens as well as the actions of political leaders. The author theorizes on the impact of crises on the nature of political leadership and on the activity of the incumbents. The paper discusses (i) whether external crises narrow or widen the room to maneuver for national political leaders, (ii) to which extent crises encourage policy innovation; (iii) what role endogenous explanation of the crises might have; (iv) how things change dramatically when political sovereignty is affected in the crises. The theoretical analysis is supplemented with short empirical case studies in the paper.
