Social Identity Leadership in Canada: The Impact of Group Identity and Individual Prototypicality on Leadership Attainment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leaders are an important part of Canadian political life. However, research has focused on the structures that shape how leaders act, not yet developing generalizable understandings of the way leadership itself is formed, exercised, and impacts outcomes. This article contributes to the closing of this knowledge gap by focusing on how scholars can understand why certain individuals, rather than others, are successfully elected leaders. It examines the usefulness of identity leadership theory (ILT) in explaining Canadian leadership outcomes by performing a comparative study of the initial electoral appeals of two successful premiers of Alberta, William Aberhart and Peter Lougheed. The approach should find that both leaders appealed to Alberta’s social identity by conveying themselves as “prototypical group members” and by incorporating their agenda into the pre-existing collective understandings. As an initial investigation, it explores the extent to which these conditions may constitute a decisive condition for successful leadership attainment. Through an analysis of discursive material, however, the results do not support the processes theorized, casting doubt on ILT’s explanatory capacity. Still, variations in Aberhart’s and Lougheed’s identitarian appeals suggest that aspiring leaders may be incentivized to pursue ILT-related strategies in favourable contexts. Future research needs to investigate the impact that individual prototypicality may have when considered alongside other leaders, appeals, and contextual factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".