Types of personal relationships among leaders, their parties and the citizens of these parties

This work is concerned with personalised leadership and with the impact of personalised leaders on their parties as well as on the electorate of these parties. It is therefore essential to determine at the outset what constitutes personalised leadership and in what ways it differs from other forms of leadership. Yet the whole concept remains rather vague, in part because, despite the fact that “leadership is as old as mankind” and that it is “universal and inescapable”, as was pointed out in the late twentieth century by one of the authors of the present volume (Blondel 1987: 1), leadership is “relatively neglected”, a point which was made by Stogdill in the mid-1970s (Stogdill 1974: 5).