Belfer Case Study Room (S020), CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138
John Gerring, Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, will be delivering the Sidney Verba Spring 2025 Lecture. The lecture, titled “Leader Tenure and Leader Power: A Global, Historical Study” is based on a book he is currently writing with co-authors Andrés Cruz, Laura de Castro Quaglia, Kenny Miao, Erzen Öncel, Harunobu Saijo.
A sign-up sheet for those interested in meeting with Professor Gerring during his visit will be circulated via email in the coming weeks.
Abstract:
Our lives are governed by organizations of one sort or another including states, government agencies, subnational governments, criminal syndicates, voluntary associations, and firms. Virtually every one of these organizations is governed by a leader or a small handful of leaders. How much power do these leaders wield?
We argue that for top leadership positions tenure in office is a key indicator of power. Those who serve long terms usually play a central role in the organization while those who pass through quickly are more marginal. Because tenure is easy to measure and information about leaders widely available this statistic provides a metric by which leader power within and across organizations can be assessed, and this, in turn, offers a window into the largely hidden life of organizations.
In this project, we track leader power through the proxy of leader tenure across three millennia, over five thousand polities, 24 organizational types, thirty-thousand organizations, fifty thousand offices, three hundred and fifty thousand leader-spells, and nearly three million leader-years. We show that while there is considerable variability in leader tenure most organizations have experienced a similar historical trajectory. Heads of government typically served long terms in antiquity but that their longevity in office began a long secular-historical decline in the early modern era, a decline that is mirrored in other political offices and in civic associations and the private sector in the contemporary era. To explain variability across organizations and through time, we adopt a delegation model of leader power and test number of specific hypotheses having to do with an organization’s degree of consensus, the challenges it faces, its degree of institutionalization, and exit costs from the organization.