Grasping at the Whirlwinds of Change: Transitional Leadership in Comparative Perspective. The Case Studies of Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. de Klerk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article makes a comparative analysis of transitional leadership through the case studies of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and F.W. de Klerk in South Africa. It examines through the prism of their political memoirs how each were able to initiate monumental change in their respective systems, but then could not hold onto power in the new political environments they helped to create. Each thought that he could construct a system that could blend old and new without negating the entire legacy of the past. Yet, each reached a point where the momentum of change pushed beyond the limits of his outlook and experience. What made Gorbachev and de Klerk able to launch change in the first place eventually made it difficult for them to function as leaders for the new age and made it difficult for people to accept them as such. Their memoirs provide poignant insight into the factors that not only enabled both of these men to become reformers, but also inhibited their capacity to become true revolutionaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".