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I'm John Gaffney, I'm Professor of Politics here at Aston University
and I'm the Co-Director of the Aston Centre for Europe.
I'm particularly interested in leadership and the study of leadership,
a lot of my research has been on France,
kind of the presidential system and the whole tradition of strong leadership in France is just fascinating for me
because it's so different from a much more laid-back,
down to earth form of leadership that has been the case -
for most the time - in the UK. And you can see that -
to a certain extent - it's the institutions, it's the fact that the President
in France is elected by direct universal suffrage, there's a lot of personalisation of politics
and the President has a whole range of constitutional powers
and so on, so power is really concentrated in the presidency in France
and that's not the case here.
But you realize - when you study it - that it's not just the institutions, it's the culture.
There is something in the way the French think
that makes them think about leadership in a different way to the way
we think about leadership, and trying to identify the reasons for that
and the effects of that actually makes
studying French politics so interesting and studying British politics - in comparison - so interesting.
It's the fact that two countries, so similar, have a such different approach to how they
perceive, and what they expect from, their political leaders.
At the moment, one of the really interesting developments in leadership studies has been...
particularly in UK politics, in fact, is a revival in the study of rhetoric.
How does a political leader get us out of our seats?
You know, why do we like the way some people speak?
And what kind of rhetoric do they use to persuade us? What kind of tricks of the trade?
What tricks of language do they use to...?
What emotions do they generate in us? And so on.
And so I'm particularly interested in looking at that
And so to look at the performance - for example - of the Leader of the Opposition - Ed Miliband -
at the last Labour Party conference, where he kind of turned around his image by...
Before the conference, he was seen as something of a liability, and so on.
And during the conference, because of the nature of the way he spoke and projected his image,
he kind of... he changed the game.
And looking at how these moments change the game is very exciting.
I've just been awarded a Leverhulme research grant to study UK political leadership
and to take my experience of France and look at a completely different political culture
where expectations of leadership are very different
is going to be extremely rewarding because
the current study that I'm doing is on UK politics
but - if all goes to plan ,if all goes well - what I would really like to do at the end of that
is to then do a real... to take the experience that I've had of both France and the UK ...and the United States situation
and to perhaps do a comparative analysis
of the US, the UK and France, to see how different cultures create different leaderships
and how those different leaders perform differently to their audiences.
The community of scholars in the UK
who are looking at political leadership and the - sort of - the symbolic nature and the rhetorical aspect to political leadership is quite a
a new and small community, so the Political Studies Association has just set up a
Politics and Rhetoric group, for example, and...so there is a small band of people
who get together at conferences, who exchange ideas,
who are looking at things like - you know - why Tony Blair's leadership was so relatively successful, why Gordon Brown's was so relatively catastrophic,
and so on and so on, and so this developing community of scholars,
looking at UK political leadership and then linking up with American and European scholars
is the exciting development of the immediate future.