Leadership and Power: A Comprehensive Survey through the Prism of Leader Tenure, with John Gerring, Andrés Cruz, Laura de Castro Quaglia, Erzen Öncel, and Harunobu Saijo

Our lives are enmeshed in organizations of one sort or another including states, government agencies, subnational governments, criminal syndicates, voluntary associations, and firms. Virtually every one of these organizations is governed by a leader or a small handful of leaders. How much power do these leaders wield?
A critical clue is provided by tenure in office. Those who serve long terms usually play a central role in the organization while those who pass through quickly are more marginal. Because tenure is easy to measure and information about leaders widely available this statistic provides a metric by which leader power within and across organizations can be assessed, and this, in turn, offers a window into the largely hidden life of organizations.
In this project, we track leader tenure across three millennia, five thousand polities, twenty-four organizational types, thirty thousand organizations, fifty thousand offices, three hundred and fifty thousand leader-spells, and three million leader-years.
We show that there has been a dramatic decline in leader tenure beginning in the early modern era among heads of state and continuing to the present with other political offices, civic associations, and the private sector. We view this as a signal of increasing institutionalization of power at the apex and an overall weakening of organizational hierarchies.
To explain variability in leader tenure/power across organizations and through time, we adopt a delegatory framework. Delegation from principal (stakeholders) to agent (leader) balances the need for strong leadership with fears of agency loss. The degree of power ceded depends specifically upon an organization’s challenges, its institutions, and its size.