Leadership succession in democratic governments and political parties is an ubiquitous but relatively understudied phenomen, where the political becomes intensely personal and vice versa. This article outlines the puzzles that leadership succession poses to political analysts, reviews the literature, and offers a conceptual framework deconstructing the process in terms of a flow from succession contexts and triggers via the role choices of key participants (incumbents and aspiring successors) through to the eventual succession outcomes. It concludes by presenting a series of testable hypotheses to describe and explain leadership successions.
The devastating terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have often been characterized as a "bolt from the blue. " Drawing inspiration from the political psychological literature on strategic surprise, this article poses the deceptively simple question of why so many U.S. policymakers were caught so woefully off guard last year. Through a preliminary empirical exploration of three broad explanatory "cuts" derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature psychological, bureau-organizational, and agenda-political-the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that may have contributed to 9/11 and point to promising avenues of investigation for future research as the available empirical record becomes more complete.