Political Science Research and Methods Life of Brian Revisited: Assessing Informational and Non­ Informational Leadership Tools Assessing Informational and Non-informational Leadership Tools 141

R ecent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders' rhetorical signals facilitate followers' coordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article empirically demonstrates that followers react to informational signals from leaders. It further theorizes that leaders use a combination of informational and non-informational tools to solve the coordination problem. The findings show that a mixture of informational and non-informational tools shapes followers' strategic calculi. Ignoring non-informational tools—and particularly the interrelationship between informational and non-informational tools—can threaten the internal validity of causal inference in the analysis of leadership effects on coordination. I n a recent review article, Ahlquist and Levi (2011) characterized models of leadership as posing the ''Life of Brian problem'' following the 1979 Monty Python movie that depicted a crowd of skeptical followers listening to various speakers, trying to decide which messiah to follow. In this problem, and in related models of leadership emergence, 1 the focus is on the rhetorical strategies of candidates for leadership positions and on followers' assessment of leader rhetoric. This approach emphasizes the leader's crucial role in providing information in the coordination game. 2 However in a real-world context, leaders do not rely solely on informational tools in order to rally and coordinate followers. They often resort to non-informational tools and offer rewards or punishments to their followers. A recent surge of theoretical studies exploring coordination and information exchange between leaders and followers has been accompanied by several experimental studies. 3 However there is still a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political settings. Even less is known about the interplay between the informational and non-informational tools that leaders use in such settings. This article provides such an empirical analysis of the informational theory of leadership and gauges the effects of the informational and non-informational tools that leaders employ to coordinate their followers. To illustrate, we use the case of contemporary Russia, where it is possible to trace and estimate both the policy signals of leaders and the determinants of followers' reactions to these signals. by the duality of executive power shared by Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev. The exact power balance in the governing coalition was …