Varieties of executive styles

This chapter situates ‘executive styles’ within the wider ‘family of styles’ approaches and discusses some of the challenges for advancing comparative research in this field. To this end, it introduces two key institutional dimensions of executive politics that shape executive styles. Subsequently, it reviews and discusses empirical research on executive styles and elaborates on two analytical dimensions for the comparison of national and sectoral executive styles. In a next step, the chapter moves to comparisons over time and reviews studies that analyse the change of executive styles in individual country cases. While a range of (country) examples are used, the chapter draws in particular on European examples and quite specifically on Germany and the UK. The chapter concludes that exploring the varieties of executive styles requires combining national accounts that engage with the institutional and political complexities of single countries, or families of nations, in detail with focussed comparisons zooming in on specific dimensions.