CREDIBILITY AS A SOURCE OF POLITICAL CAPITAL

Author : Sabine van Zuydam Tilburg University

For political leaders to be able to function and to deliver, having a healthy ‘stock’ of political capital is essential. Political capital has been described in various ways, but in one way or another it relates to something that leaders need to have in order to get things done. The political capital of leaders is ‘the aggregate of a leader’s political resources’ and it can take three main forms: skills, relations and reputation. The first main form of political capital, skills, can be broken down into two types of skills. On the one hand leaders can draw political capital from ‘hard’ skills, which refer to transactional qualities like technical competence resulting in tangible achievements. Soft skills, on the other hand, include providing a compelling vision and inspiring one’s audience. Overall, skills thus refer to the ‘cognitive, physical, communicative and managerial capacity’

Relational capital, secondly, follows from the notion that authority and political capital do not exist in isolation, but they come about in the relationship between leaders and followers. As such, relational capital ‘refers to the loyalties that leaders mobilize’. This does not only relate to the relationship with party members, but to the relationship with the media and the wider electorate as well. To be able to gain relational capital, the audience’s needs, interests and wishes should be perceived to match with what the leader in question has to offer.

The last main form of leaders’ political capital can be summarized as ‘walking the talk’ and thus entails the extent to which a leader is experienced to have kept his promises and the extent to which he has lived up to the expectations.

Reputation can help to build leaders’ political capital only when two conditions are met. First of all, the ‘normative core’ should be perceived as fitting for the times according to the audience. Secondly, if promise and reality do not match a leader’s reputation is not necessarily damaged. The gap can, for example, be considered limited or caused by external circumstances instead of by leaders’ faults. This conceptualization of leaders’ political capital consisting of skills, relations and reputation shows a resemblance to the traits leaders need to have to be considered credible.

To be credible, leaders need to be competent, trustworthy, and caring for their audience. In other words: they need to have the necessary skills and knowledge, they need to be honest, and they should not be in politics for personal gain. Although this resemblance between political capital and credibility might seem clear, it requires further exploration as it is not often been considered systematically.

Credibility is a source of political capital for leaders, meaning that being considered credible lends a leader political capital to spend. It is not as much about the skills that leaders ‘really’ possess, but what matters are ‘the competencies that are projected on to leaders by their authorizing environment’. As such it is the audience, like an audience of citizens, who in the interaction with leaders attribute certain abilities to their leaders. What remains to be sufficiently answered is on what basis citizens determine that leaders have certain traits or skills. What is it that leaders do or say – how do they perform – that citizens reach the conclusion that their leaders are credible?

At this point it might seem self-evident that leaders need political capital, if only because the word capital is associated with something that is desirable. Nevertheless, it is possible to be more specific about the relevance of political capital if a closer look is taken at the nature of (political) leadership.

Leadership consists of three consecutive tasks. The first is to diagnose what is going on; what is the problem that needs to be addressed? Following on the diagnosis it becomes necessary to ‘prescribe a course of action’, which means that the problem that was identified is in need of an answer. Finally, only identifying a problem and formulating a solution is not enough if people do not act upon it. In other words, key to leading is to mobilize others toward the prescribed course of action to address the identified problem. Leadership is a complex concept which attempts to cover a complex reality: that of citizens prepared, to an extent at least, to follow a ruler in the direction s/he chooses’ . To persuade someone to follow a leader in the direction he chooses is not that simple. Political leaders face complex problems and need to take tough decisions with sometimes unpleasant consequences for citizens . To be able to take the necessary but perhaps unpopular decisions, and to survive taking them as well, leaders need political capital.

Credibility has gained importance over roughly the last 25 years due to the presence of network governance, and the personalization of political communication. Although these developments apply to government and the interaction between politics and society respectively, what they have in common is that a stronger focus is put on political leaders to gain support for plans and proposals. This support cannot be demanded by force, but needs to be gained through persuasion. Credible speakers are those speakers who are considered competent, caring, and trustworthy by their audience . Although this sheds light on the notion of credibility, it does not clarify what it means to be considered competent, caring, and trustworthy. After all, credibility is a relational and dynamic concept in which it is the audience who time and again decides whether the leader in question is worthy of being attributed credibility.

To discover what it takes for leaders to be considered competent, caring, and trustworthy, taking a dramaturgical perspective is instrumental. With use of this perspective it becomes possible to move beyond the projected traits to how leaders actually perform vis-à-vis an audience. Through staging, framing, and scripting political leaders can manage their performance and try to build the desired image.

Leaders are not necessarily successful in building such a credible image and  clues to understand why can be found in their performance. Credible political leaders take initiative in defending against critique and in connecting individual views into an overarching vision, as well as that they speak to both minds and hearts of citizens. Leaders can have the necessary qualities; they can appear to be the best man for the job, but if it is not recognized that expectations have been met in what leaders have accomplished, it can be argued that leaders’ capital to act suffers. Leaders must show through tangible results, or the appearance of such, that they can deliver on their promises’ . By showing tangible results leaders can prove that their plan has worked and as such ensure that future plans will be favorably assessed. Living up to expectations and achieving the promised results thus helps leaders to gain political capital. These sources of political capital are presented as more or less independent of each other. However, it is likely that in practice they are highly intertwined and that the sources of political capital can reinforce each other. Indeed, it is not unthinkable that (cognitive) skills and appearing competent as part of credibility can only be separated analytically. Moreover, getting things done might become difficult without being credible, as credibility is needed to – for example – convince other participants in a governance network to cooperate. However, also the other way around (perceived) achievements can foster credibility as it can be used as proof and as such can help leaders to show in their performance that they are worthy of being attributed credibility.