2025 Theses Doctoral

The Puzzle of Leadership in Democratic Theory

Peisajovich, Nicole Mariel

This dissertation challenges the long-standing tendency in democratic theory to neglect, downplay, and, at times, altogether reject leadership as a normative component of democracy. While the topic of leadership is commonplace in empirical analyses of democratic politics, normative democratic theory remains largely silent on the role of leaders. Against this constraining legacy, I argue that leadership should be recognized as a constitutive—in fact, indispensable—element of a democratic regime.

Through a critical examination of the three most influential traditions within postwar democratic theory—realist, participatory, and deliberative—I show that none has succeeded in offering a principled defense of leadership. Realist theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl incorporated leaders into their frameworks, but only as a pragmatic concession to the problems of scale and complexity. Writing against what they saw as an elitist turn in democratic theory, the participatory theorists of the 1960s constructed an alternative model centered on the direct participation of ordinary citizens. Yet in disavowing leadership, participators ended up enabling even worse forms of it: informal, opaque, and unaccountable. Deliberative democrats, lastly, neither endorsed nor repudiated leadership; instead, they have largely ignored it. Although mass deliberation presupposes actors who initiate, facilitate, and give shape to collective reasoning, the deliberative tradition offers little guidance on who those actors are or how they ought to be constrained. Under this framework, too, leadership was bracketed, sidelined, or rendered invisible.

To find an alternative and more productive way of thinking about the role of leaders in democratic settings, I turn to classical Athens. Unlike most contemporary theorists, the ancient Athenians did not regard leadership as antithetical to democracy, neither in theory nor in practice. Theoretically, democracy was defined not by the absence of all power inequalities, but by two crucial yet circumscribed principles of equality: isonomia (equal political rights) and isegoria (equal right to address the political assemblies).

While these principles guaranteed citizens equal standing within the formal structures of political decision-making, they did not require the erasure of all political differentiation. On the contrary, Athenian democracy depended on a spirit of competition that presupposed the possibility of distinguishing oneself. In practice, the Athenians recognized that leaders were not only necessary but also beneficial to the functioning of the regime: they contributed technical competence, procedural efficiency, ideological coherence, and political pluralism. Although the Athenian case cannot fully resolve the dilemmas facing modern representative democracies, it offers a more promising foundation for developing a normative theory of democratic leadership—one that views leadership not merely as a force to be constrained, but as one of democracy’s key assets.