Democratic Leadership Revisited

Political theorists such as James MacGregor Burns (1978/2010), J. Ronald Pennock (1979), and Eric Beerbohm (2015) have argued that democratic leaders, to be democratic, must forge joint commitments with their followers before they act. But what happens when leaders act without doing so? Does this make them undemocratic? In this article, I challenge this standard, stepwise model of democratic leadership. I outline alternative models of democratic leadership that do not require leaders to forge joint commitments with their followers before they act. Democratic leaders must provide justifications for their actions, and they must be held accountable for them, but they might nevertheless act before they forge joint commitments with followers. In a trust‐based model of democratic leadership, for example, trust functions as a temporary stand‐in for justification, giving democratic leaders leeway to make decisions without first consulting their publics or forging joint commitments with them. In the hindsight model of democratic leadership, the consequences of actions can take the place of—or supplement—the justifications leaders provide. I argue that these alternative models of democratic leadership are more consistent with practices of leadership in the real world of politics. I illustrate the theory with two examples: The first focuses on Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s decision to introduce the Goods and Services Tax in 1991; the second examines German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership during the European “migrant crisis” in 2015.