Gendering Executive-centric Governments: The Power, Peril, and Paradox of Leadership in Anglo Nations

Gendering the executive-centric governments of Anglo nations can shed light on the range of opportunities and obstacles that prime ministers encounter. Concentration of executive authority might permit the development of a presidentialized premier or remain in the collective decision making of cabinet even with a prime minister more influential than one who is “first among equals. ” Whether presidential or prime ministerial, the scope and nature of the executive always include gender-specific requirements. Presidentialization proves predominantly masculine, while more traditional prime ministerial leadership tends to mix the masculine and the feminine – and both types of leadership fluctuate in political development. Understanding the gendered character of particular leadership environments can highlight the power and peril of presidentialization and expose the paradox of prime ministerial leadership. The record of female prime ministers reveals what the study of men alone often conceals: how institutions and their development determine the gendered nature of the executive in ways that define leadership challenges. While comparing the experiences of male and female leaders, this paper focuses on five women in Anglo nations: Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom 1979-90), Kim Campbell (Canada 1993), Jenny Shipley (New Zealand 199799), Helen Clark (New Zealand, 1999-2008), and Julia Gillard (Australia 2010-present). Data include public opinion polls, news sources, leaders’ memoirs and diaries, and extensive elite interviews conducted by the author. Gendering the executive-centric governments of Anglo nations can shed light on the range of opportunities and obstacles that prime ministers encounter. Concentration of executive authority might permit the development of a presidentialized premier or remain in the collective decision making of cabinet even with a prime minister more influential than one who is “first among equals. ” Whether presidential or prime ministerial, the scope and nature of the executive always include gender-specific requirements. Presidentialization proves predominantly masculine, while more traditional prime ministerial leadership tends to mix the masculine and the feminine – and both types of leadership fluctuate in political development. Understanding the gendered character of particular leadership environments can highlight the power and peril of presidentialization and expose the paradox of prime ministerial leadership. The record of female prime ministers reveals what the study of men alone often conceals: how institutions and their development determine the gendered nature of the executive in ways that define leadership challenges. While comparing the experiences of male and female leaders, this paper focuses on five women in Anglo nations: Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom 1979-90), Kim Campbell (Canada 1993), Jenny Shipley (New Zealand 1997-99), Helen Clark (New Zealand, 1999-2008), and Julia Gillard (Australia 2010-present). Several reasons exist to examine the experience of female prime ministers in the “Anglo sphere. ” Although the small set presents too few cases to generalize, their records hint at what the future holds for female leaders. Moreover, exploring their limited experience can generate hypotheses for subsequent research not only on women as prime ministers but also in other positions of executive leadership. Finally, Anglo nations share legal, philosophical, and political traditions that facilitate reasonable comparisons. In all Anglo nations, the gender-specific character of executive leadership affects both men and women, although it often does so in different ways. The gendered nature of Anglo systems usually erects higher barriers for female leaders, but men as well as women differ in their inclination and ability to convey genderspecific attributes (Connell 1995, 69). Gender-based norms become embedded in institutions, and gender provides a lens that filters leadership traits and determines their value. The gendered context of leadership helps shape perceptions of a prime minister as weak or strong, empathetic and compassionate or unresponsive and out of touch. Especially in Anglo nations, masculinity usually permeates power and politics, and “masculinism” often pervades expectations and constructs of leadership (DiStefano 1991; Duerst-Lahti and Kelly eds. 1995, 21-26). Gender studies have generated the term masculinism to denote the privileged status of conventional masculine attributes such as strength, decisiveness, and determination. Applied to executive leadership, masculinism prefers characteristics such as conviction, confrontation, and combativeness. By contrast, “feminalism” prefers traits associated with women such as conciliation, cooperation, and consensus building. Though masculinism and feminalism (or “the feminale”) can be distinguished from their socially-constructed counterparts (Duerst-Lahti 2002), for the sake of simplicity, this paper employs the simpler adjectives masculine and feminine. Gendering Institutions and Development Masculine requirements for leadership become most apparent in the adversarial institutional arrangements that traditionally characterize Westminster systems. To facilitate programmatic change, adversarial systems concentrate power in the executive, and to ensure accountability, they rely on combat between two major parties. The more adversarial the system, the more masculine its norms and expectations of executive leadership tend to be. In general, majoritarian systems prove more challenging for female leaders than consensual ones (Lijphart 1999), which is one of the reasons why, among the “families of nations” (Castles ed. 1993), the Anglo sphere ranks much lower in the representation and leadership of women than Scandinavia. Female leaders in adversarial, Anglo systems often need to develop styles and strategies that show they are capable of being tough enough for the job. As a result women who wish to engender change by practicing different styles get caught in a double bind. If they mimic men, they reinforce the masculine norms and expectations of their institution, but if they introduce a different approach to leadership, they might well appear too weak to lead. Furthermore, when executive leaders exalt the values of rugged individualism and fierce competition, as they have done during neo-liberal era, prime ministers prove to be masculine in word as well as deed. Ideas have often reinforced the masculinity of institutions in Anglo systems where liberal ideology (classic or neo) has tended to dominate development. The gendered nature of institutions fluctuates in development, and two types of time – linear historical and cyclical political – influence the prospects and performance of prime ministers. Despite the dominance of masculinity, Anglo institutions also include some aspects of governance that could be construed as feminine. To secure individual rights, for example, classic liberal theorists in the Anglo tradition promoted a political order that would generate consensus and require compromise or conciliation for the sake of stability. Furthermore, even within adversarial systems, Anglo institutions usually operate with some degree of consensus, and debate takes place within a constitutional context of mutually agreed-upon principles. Finally and most significantly, in Anglo two-party systems, traditional cabinet government forces prime ministers to negotiate with the various factions or tendencies that ministers represent, thereby providing the basis for and legitimizing “collective responsibility. ” If Anglo institutions contain both masculine and feminine elements, then the gendered nature of governance will shift at different junctures in political development. As a result, time itself becomes gendered. Linear historical time generally limits female prime ministers in Anglo systems, although it once provided a path for the progress of women’s movements. In historical development, a “Britonnic network” of reformers linked and assisted women’s movements during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Belich 2001, 167; Backhouse and Flaherty 1992), and the success of those movements has made it possible for women to become prime minister. Despite the substantial achievement of the women’s movements, their efforts eventually ran up against at least one significant institutional development in the second half of the 20 century. The increased concentration of power in the executive permits various degrees of “presidentialization” in many parliamentary systems (Poguntke and Webb eds. 2005) and the politicization of presidential ones (Moe 1985). In theory, a female executive could seize the opportunities inherent in the position of a presidentialized premier and use them to set a feminist agenda. Nevertheless, in Westminster systems it has proven much more difficult for a woman than for a man to adopt a feminine style of leadership and still satisfy the linear, historical demands of a strong executive. All Westminster systems are executive centric (Dowding 2012), but whether the centralization of executive authority maintains the collective decision making of cabinet or lands in the hands of a prime minister often determines whether and how far presidentialization can proceed. The nature and extent of presidentialization in parliamentary systems has generated substantial scholarly debate. On the side of presidentialization, scholars have identified three “faces”: the executive, where prime ministers politicize the appointment process and devise unilateral policy; the party, where power shifts to a leader who prefers to bypass the organization; and the electorate, which becomes the target of and responds to the leader’s appeals channeled through the media rather than traditional intermediaries (Poguntke and Webb eds. 2005). On the other side of the debate, opponents tend to concede that prime ministerial leadershi