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Contingency and political action. The role of leadership in endogenously created crises

Crises and exceptional situations are usually described as exogenous challenges for political leadership. Leaders are reactive to their political environment (structure), which strongly shapes their activity as situational and contingency theories of leadership emphasize it. In contrast, this paper claims that crises and exceptional situations might be engendered endogenously, by political agency. Relying on Kari Palonen’s differentiation between two types of contingency (Machiavellian and Weberian) it tries to set up a two-dimensional framework for analyzing political situations and types of political action. The paper provides various empirical examples (including George W. Bush’s leadership after 9/11 and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s unorthodox crisis-management from 2010 onwards) to illustrate the usefulness of this framework.


Introduction
1 Great leaders need crisis situations to gain power to (re)act (Rossiter, 1948;Genovese, 1979), but crisis situations 2 need great leaders in order to be solved as well (Tucker, 1968, p. 745;Tucker, 1995). Generally, a crisis is seen as a 3 pressure and an urgent threat, which leaders must survive as they adapt to the new situation. Leadership always 4 seems to be reactive: leaders must make sense of the crisis, give it meaning, harness and shape it through their 5 responses, give an account after a crisis and even learn lessons from it (Ansell et Genovese, 1986;Heifetz, 1998). However, from a different ontological basis The problem arises from the structure-agency debate. A fundamental problem for political leadership studies is how 18 the relationship between the political actors and the environment in which they find themselves is managed. Calls 19 for research into the dilemma of the structure-agency problem in leadership studies are not new (Hargrove, 2004; 20 Jones, 1989;Masciulli et al., 2009;'t Hart & Rhodes, 2014). Three different approaches can be distinguished in this 21 debate: a structure-oriented (structuralist or determinist) approach, an agency-oriented (intentionalist or 22 voluntarist) one, and a literature that aims to transcend this dualism. " Agency" is understood as a capacity to act 23 upon situations, as a property of actors to be able to formulate and implement decisions. On the other hand, 24 "structure" means the situation, context and political environment. It refers to the conditions within which actors 25 operate and seize the opportunities, and which constrain their actions. Essentially, structure and agency are two 26 sides of the same coin, as they coexist in a political process.

27
In a crisis situation, where leadership differs from leadership in routine times, this dualism is more problematic. In 28 this paper we aim to contribute to this debate on the conceptual level. Relying heavily on the works of Kari Palonen 29 (1998; 2001), we describe contingency as the nature of relations between structure and agency. Contingency can 30 serve both as a constraint on political action (as in The Prince of Machiavelli) as well as a chance or means for such 31 action (as in the works of Max Weber) . We take crisis, as a situation with an extraordinarily high level of 32 contingency, to highlight this "dual nature" of contingency for political agency. (This concept, in our view, is suitable 33 to attenuate the rigidity of the structure-agency dualism). In this paper we focus on incumbent leaders, who control 34 crisis governments (Rossiter, 1948, p to the outcome of the actions they govern, it may be said to endow human conduct with a 62 formality in which its contingency is somewhat abated." (Oakeshott, 1990, p. 74) In a crisis situation it is precisely these "rules and duties" (and conventions, authorities) that become dubious, thereby making the political situation uncertain. 1 66 67 The difference in the nature of uncertainty from that of indeterminacy can also be highlighted by the Knightian 68 conceptual differentiation between risk and uncertainty familiar from economics. While risk is measurable and 69 calculable (because conditions are known, as in the case of roulette or chess, or generally in the game theory), 70 uncertainty is not (because conditions are not known, and we cannot make predictions). Therefore, it is not only the 71 higher intensity, but the different nature of contingency that differentiates crisis situations from normal states. It is 72 not only a higher level of contingency, but a different type of contingency that charaterizes crises. Uncertainty, 73 rather than risk, characterizes crisis and extraordinary situations.

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To summarize: we have attempted to differentiate between a "softer" and a "harder" form of contingency (see 76

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To establish a connection between contingency and political agency, we attempt to use a work by Kari Palonen 83 (Palonen, 1998) as a point of departure. Palonen differentiates between the "Machiavellian Moment" (cf. Pocock, 84 1975) and what he calls the "Weberian Moment". His main argument, roughly summarized, is that while in the 85 former contingency is mainly an external challenge for political action, in the latter it becomes its constitutive 86 element. Here we try to summarize briefly the differences between these two "Moments" (see Table 2). These 87 considerations will serve as the foundation of our typology concerning the relationship between political agency and 88 crises.

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(1) The background of political action in the Machiavellian Moment is uncertain. The main problem of The Prince is 91 the retention of principalities newly acquired through the arms of others and through good fortune. As Machiavelli 92 emphasizes, these cases are when the situation of the rulers is the most difficult, because they cannot rely on 93 traditional legitimacy, only on the "two most inconstant and unstable things". The factors that would nudge 94 uncertainty into indeterminacy are apparently missing. Contrary to that, the historical context of Weber's work is a 95 marked by bureaucratization, which forms a stable background to political action, abating contingency by its rules 96 and standard procedures.

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(2) For Machiavelli, the main threat that political action must face is the desolation of fortuna, which is compared by 99 him to "raging rivers" in Chapter 25 of The Prince. For Weber, the main problem consists not in taming the forces of 100 fortuna, but in avoiding the "petrification" of bureaucratic structures. Put differently: his main concern is with the 101 possibility of politics, not with that of order (Palonen, 2001

An analytical matrix and empirical examples
Up to this point, we have claimed that (1) a crisis situation is marked by the presence of a subtype of contingency: 135 uncertainty; and (2) that contingency can be both the background condition and a constitutive element of political 136 agency. In this section, first, we will set up an analytical typology of the relationship between political agency and 137 crisis, thereby interrelating the two above-mentioned conceptual distinctions. Second, we will give empirical 138 examples to make our typology more plausible. Our focus will be on the working of operative contingency through 139 re-interpretation of a hitherto exogenous understanding of crisis (quadrant C) and through endogenous crisis-

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In what follows, each type of relationship between political agency and crisis will be explored and a few examples 180 will be provided to highlight the main features thereof. work within a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing", states Hall (1993, p. 279.). Policy-paradigm is a lense for perceiving problems, a way of cognition of the world and an attitude to the potential modes of dealing with it. Hence, by paradigm change we mean the change of the hierarchy of overarching goals guiding policy.  sovereign, comes to the fore to be activated (Ackerman, 1998

415
This paper aimed to contribute to the field at two levels. First, at the conceptual level we aimed to overcome, or at 416 least to alleviate, the stark distinction between structure and agency through the concept of contingency.

417
Contingency, as we have seen, can be a constraining element of the structure that forces the politician to take a 418 certain course of action (background contingency). But at the same time it can become operative, if the political 419 actor wants and is able to take risk (Weber), or continually makes order and recreates chaos (Schabert, 1989). The