Gubernatorial Leadership: Testing a preliminary model

This article provides an empirical test of a model of gubernatorial leadership. The model includes personal, political, institutional and environmental factors that leadership theorists have asserted are important to leadership success. Utilizing a longitudinal design, ordinary least squares regression is employed to relate these variables to two distinctive measures of leadership success: one quantitative, one perceptual. The explanatory value of the model varies with the measure of gubernatorial success: it is a better predictor of perceived success than it is of success with the state legislature. One variable, gubernatorial skill and experience enters both models successfully. Gubernatorial personality, the nature of the strategy employed by the governor when announcing his policy priorities, and electoral margin also explain some of the variance in perceived success.