Life of Brian Revisited: Assessing Informational and Non-Informational Leadership Tools

Recent literature models leadership as the process of communication where the rhetorical signals of leaders facilitate followers’ coordination. While studies exist that 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 subnational legislative addresses in Russia, this paper empirically demonstrates that followers react to informational signals from leaders. We further theorize that leaders employ a combination of informational and non-informational tools in order to solve the coordination problem. The findings show that strategic calculus of followers is determined by a mixture of informational and noninformational tools. Ignoring the non-informational tools and particularly the interrelationship between the latter and the informational tools can threaten internal validity of causal inference in the analysis of leadership effects on coordination.