One of the most important aspects of academic life is cooperation between researchers from different centres. Different levels of experience, approaches and paradigms enable researchers to observe the complete image of categories. The Political Leadership Section of the Polish Political Science Association has been formed during the Second Nationwide Congress of Political Science in Poznań (2012). The Association’s Board has established it on February 7, 2013. Since that day the section integrates scholars from different universities interested in issues of political leadership, it supports development of this research field in Poland, it collects published monographs, editions and papers relevant to this field and it coordinates development of teaching standards in education on political leadership. The section’s activity and its role in Polish academic community proves that this topic has become a significant aspect of social sciences in the country. 

Scientific discussion on political leadership increasingly takes on the form of interdisciplinary argumentation, in which different research perspectives, models and explanatory conceptual grids overlap. This state of affairs is on the one hand dictated by the contemporary trends in scientific research, especially in the broadly defined social sciences, where the cognitive, explanatory or descriptive relevance is achieved only by taking into account a broader, inter-disciplinary nature of scientific knowledge. In this sense, a thorough, reliable research practice consists primarily in crossing the formal borders of scientific disciplines, where researchers renounce the “complex” of detailed and firm definitions of their own subject of study to turn instead towards integration of knowledge from various, often very different, areas. The above is mainly due to the dispersion of objective scientific knowledge, which is conditioned, among others by: scientific and technical progress, the phenomenon of intertextuality (modern researchers in humanities concentrate their research effort on the texts and practices associated with this phenomenon, which means that their primary method in analyses of political phenomena is to fortify the text – specifically, to prepare the scientific text in such a way as to meet the standards of scientific writing and withstand criticism in the absence of the writer; as well as conceptual-theoretical pluralism present in social sciences. On the other hand, it is the result of scientific analysis of the given forms and practices of leadership, where nowadays greater attention is paid to the multi-dimensionality of leadership processes in politics, related to: the multi-level nature of concepts and research (meso, micro and macro-theoretical level analyses) and the need to take into account a large number of variables in the study of leadership (personality and environmental, situational, institutional factors, economic, political or religious variables). The consequence of this state of affairs is the multi-paradigm character of leadership, which in this case means that very often highly different ways of defining and explaining the complex relationship between a particular political leader and followers co-exist within the discipline. In addition, the multiplicity of paradigms of political leadership is a feature demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge generated by political science, where various claims, theses, observations or conclusions complement each other, for example those originating in disciplines such as sociology, law, psychology, management sciences and cultural studies.

Political leadership is still a research area requiring the most up-to-date approaches, since, being a constant phenomenon in its essence, it is subject to the processes of form transformation. Throughout history, we can indicate the directions of change of the leadership phenomenon. From tribal communities, where often quasi-political functions were combined with religious functions (based on the charismatic authority of shamans), through the time of statesmen and ideological leadership, we have now arrived at the era of media leaders.

The ability to manage other people’s behavior has always intrigued philosophers. The fate of each human being and each community depend – in a way that is not easy to measure – on other people. Who are these “other people”? Why can they determine the direction of our thoughts and actions? What relation takes place between them, those who manage, and us, who are willing to be obedient? Which part of our social subjectivity are we willing to give up for the sake of these “others”? Such and many more important questions mark what may seem as an undefined framework of a never-ending, inconclusive discourse. However, once we decide to take an active part in this discourse, we need to take a responsibility to frame the subject matter, at the very least in a conventional manner, remaining aware that when each argument and each statement are equally relevant in terms of their content value, none is worth attention since they all are deprived of their explanatory value.

The aim of this article is to analyze one of the basic methods of measuring political leadership, namely the idealization method proposed by Max Weber. Although this method does not exhaust all available methods of studying the phenomenon of political leadership, it is worth paying attention to the possibility of constructing, on the basis of it, much more diverse and advanced cognitive methods, which are used not only to measure political leadership, but also to conceptualize this theoretical category. Consequently, it becomes possible to see the essence of the complex and evolving relationship between a political leader and his supporters in various aspects of the public sphere. Using the ideal type method, one should also consider the possibility of using subtypes which are located on the continuum beetwen by antinomic ideal types such as absolute power versus political leadership.

Since 2002, the Justice and Development Party and its undisputed leader, the current leader of the state, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have enjoyed unwavering support on the Turkish political scene. The processes taking place in Türkiye are referred to as the “erdoganisation of Turkish politics.” It is happening both at the level of the state’s internal policy and foreign policy, referred to as “Erdoğan’s foreign policy.” These processes are proceeding in parallel with the growing role that Erdoğan plays in his own party. He became the undisputed leader of the party, and then of the entire state. He is also positively evaluated in the societies of other Muslim states. In the case of Türkiye, an important issue that required analysis was the adaptation of institutional solutions to the changing position of individual entities and paying attention to strengthening the role of the individual/leader within the political system of the state.