Guest editorial: Leadership in times of crisis: the intersection of political and administrative leadership

In early 2020 just as the crisis was unfolding, this journal, like many others, attempted to expedite research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our concern was to draw some early lessons about how public leaders across the globe were leading andmanaging their countries through the crisis because, as Boin and ’t Hart (2003, p. 544) noted, “Crisis and leadership are closely intertwined phenomena.” Moreover, we know that in crisis situations, leadership, in varied forms and addressing myriad questions, is critical (’t Hart and Tummers, 2019; Hartley, 2018; Boin et al., 2017). The result was a very successful special issue published last year (Vol. 17, No. 1) entitled, “Public Leadership in Times of Crisis –Viewpoints on Political and Administrative Leadership in Response to COVID-19.” At the time that this special issue of the International Journal of Public Leadership in the time of COVID-19 issue was developed, we optimistically looked ahead to a time when this global pandemic would be behind us and simultaneously put out a call for a second special issue that would examine public leadership in response to crisis situations other than the one presented by the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, we were interested in receiving in-depth, theoretically oriented research studies that addressed how politicians, public servants and civil society actors provide leadership in response to different kinds of crises –be they political (for example, responding to and preparing for Brexit), social and economic (such as a famine or drought in Africa or an Asian tsunami) or health-related (including the global severe acute respiratory syndrome [SARS] crisis, or the avian flu). The crisis responses to the pandemic have uncovered the limits of our understanding and practice of public leadership. The varied ranges of responses and effectiveness nationally, in the contrasts between New Zealand, China, the USA, South Korea and South Africa, to name but a few, call for more robust ways of researching public leadership across significantly different societal and institutional contexts. Moreover, even within the same nation, such as the USA, the intergovernmental dimension of relations and authorities across federal, state, county and city governments calls for research specific to intergovernmental dimensions (Kizer and Callahan, 2021). The intergovernmental research begins to find varied leadership emphasis and divergent approaches even within the same level of government, such as counties (National Academy of Public Administration, 2021). The challenges of leaders responding to the pandemic suggest the limits of our current understanding of public leadership. The traditional politics-administration dichotomy provides very little traction in explaining public leadership in governance structures that are “messy, disorganized, disconnected and unwieldy” and with significant power in informal networks (Abramson, 2021). The research utility of the political-administrative dichotomy breaks down in explaining the nearly 30 public health directors who resigned or were forced to resign in the USA in the first three months of the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as when administrators are not simply questioned but also threatened verbally and physically both by elected officials and the general public (Mello et al., 2020). Research has revealed that crises, whatever their origin, have the potential to transform “leaders into statesmen” when successfully handled or “obvious scapegoats” if it is not resolved and a return to normalcy is delayed or prevented altogether (Boin and ’t Hart, 2003, Guest editorial