Owens, J., Schraufnagel, S. and Li, Q. 2016. Assessing the Effects of Personal Characteristics and Context on U.S. House Speakers’ Leadership Styles, 1789-2006. Sage Open. 2016 (April). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244016643143
| Title | Assessing the Effects of Personal Characteristics and Context on U.S. House Speakers’ Leadership Styles, 1789-2006 |
|---|---|
| Type | Journal article |
| Authors | Owens, J., Schraufnagel, S. and Li, Q. |
| Abstract | Research on congressional leadership has been dominated in recent decades by contextual interpretations that see leaders’ behavior as best explained by the environment in which they seek to exercise leadership—particularly, the preference homogeneity and size of their party caucus. The role of agency is thus discounted, and leaders’ personal characteristics and leadership styles are underplayed. Focusing specifically on the speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives from the first to the 110th Congress, we construct measures of each speaker’s commitment to comity and leadership assertiveness. We find the scores reliable and then test the extent to which a speaker’s style is the product of both political context and personal characteristics. Regression estimates on speakers’ personal assertiveness scores provide robust support for a context-plus-personal characteristics explanation, whereas estimates of their comity scores show that speakers’ personal backgrounds trump context. |
| Keywords | Leadership style |
| US Congress | |
| Speakers of the US House of Representatives | |
| political behaviour/psychology | |
| Journal | Sage Open |
| Journal citation | 2016 (April) |
| ISSN | 2158-2440 |
| Year | 2016 |
| Publisher | Sage |
| Accepted author manuscript | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Publisher's version | License CC BY 3.0 File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244016643143 |
| Web address (URL) | https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244016643143 |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 22 Apr 2016 |
| Supplemental file | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |