It is not an accident that the concept of ‘leader democracy’ has been gaining currency only since the last decades of the twentieth century. The earlier period, especially the three decades of post–Second World War reconstruction in the industrialised West, could be well characterised as ‘party democracy’ – a period when the central role in political elites was played by entrenched and ideologically organised ‘machines’ and directorates of mass ‘cleavage’ parties (Volksparteien). There were some variations, though. Political power in America, and in other presidential systems, was always more concentrated and leadercentred than in the European parliamentary systems. It was the president who formed and led the ‘core executives’, coordinated the pressures within the power elite and headed election campaigns, even if presidential nomination was in the hands of party heads. The typical European parliamentary democracies, by contrast, had approximated ‘party democracy’ until the final decades of the twentieth century.

This postwar configuration was, no doubt, a reaction to – or strictly speaking a recoiling against – the highly concentrated, personalised, autocratic and nationalistic leadership in fascist and communist regimes that continued to cast a shadow over European politics long after their demise. The results generated a leader-phobia combined with a vigorously collectivistic and pluralistic ethos. The popular leader-phobia helped in imposing collegial constraints on political decisions and prompted the executive ruling minorities to keep a low political profile. For the Western ‘baby boom’ generation and their East European ‘post-Stalinist’ equivalent, strong state and centralised leadership had highly antidemocratic connotations.