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Comparative
Patricia Lee Sykes has observed, correctly, that not all political leaders are leaders. Most of those who occupy leadership positions are content to manage and conciliate, to keep the show on the road without worrying over much about where the show is going. However, a few leaders, ‘conviction politicians’, actually try to take their countries in new directions.
Presidents and Prime Ministers is a study of conviction politicians in the USA and the UK since the mid-nineteenth century. The author develops four pair-wise comparisons of conviction presidents and prime ministers – Jackson/Peel, Cleveland/Gladstone, Wilson/Lloyd George and Reagan/Thatcher – and then reflects on how these unusual men and women have related to their party, the media of their time, their own administrations, the wider world and the Anglo-American political tradition. Sykes’s central concern is to elaborate a ‘wave’ theory to the effect that pairs of conviction leaders appear more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic and then go on to pursue similar ideological and policy objectives.
Embedded in Sykes’s analysis are many useful observations (for example, that conviction politicians typically work round their parties rather than through them). But her analysis, taken as a whole, ultimately fails to convince. Her selection of conviction politicians will strike most readers as arbitrary. So will some of her ‘waves’. Conviction politicians who failed are largely written out of the script. The author’s exclusive focus on the US-UK connection loses sight of other important connections (for example, Lloyd George’s with pre-1914 Germany).
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