Unpopular Leaders: The British Case

Abstract

Liberal capitalist democracies are experiencing unprecedented public discontent with their elected leaders. Attempts to explain this phenomenon have assumed that citizens' appraisal of politicians' performance is unproblematic. In complex modern states, however, intelligible politics requires intellectual and institutional frameworks for systematically relating government actions to social outcomes. In early post-war Britain, overlapping notions of Keynesian, socialist, and welfare states fortuitously made possible economical public interpretation of politics. While susceptible to partial modification, this post-war conception of state agency is no longer tenable. A new interpretative framework is a precondition for accountable and popular leadership.