Leadership Rhetoric: Defining the Terms

Abstract

Chapters 2 and 3 locate democratic leadership ethics in a political context, where public administrators work under the direction of the political executive and under the scrutiny of accountability agencies responsible for legislators who can use the power of publicity either to honor or to discredit the reputation of administrators. Neither of these two chapters portrays the leadership role of administrators as something standing alone in public life. Both chapters locate the administrative arm of democratic government under the powerful influence of the political executive, with whom public administrators share whatever public power they possess. Democratic governance delegates considerable power to administrators to advise, revise, and implement public policy, assuming that the public interest is reinforced when the people and their elected political leaders share power with nonelected bureaucratic representatives. Usually this delegation rests on very limited terms and conditions to weaken the discretionary power of bureaucrats to substitute their leadership for that of electors and elected representatives, whose public mandate has greater rhetorical force than any public-interest discretion favored by bureaucrats.