主 题：The Leader as Catalyst: On Mass Movements and the Mechanics of Institutional Change
主讲人：加拿大女皇大学 Sumon Majumdar副教授
主持人：西南财经大学经济与管理研究院 胡又欣副教授
时 间：2014年4月11日下午2：30－4点
地 点：柳林校区颐德楼H513
主办单位：经济与管理研究院 科研处
主讲人简介：
Sumon Majumdar 现为加拿大女皇大学经济系副教授。2001年获波士顿大学经济学博士学位，此前先后获印度统计学院统计学学士和硕士学位。他的研究领域为政治经济学、劳动经济学、应用微观理论和发展经济学。他的论文见于American Economic Review, International Economic Review, Labor Economics, Journal of Development Economics 等顶尖经济学期刊上。个人网页：http://www.econ.queensu.ca/faculty/majumdar。
内容提要：
为什么有些领导者能获得大众支持从而成功地引发革命性的制度变迁，而有些领导者则失败？本文的理论模型表明：理解领导者成功的关键是剖析领导者和忠诚的积极分子－追随者之间的象征性的关系。Why are some leaders able to rally mass support and successfully catalyze revolutionary change while others fail? We argue that the key to understanding a leader’s effectiveness lies in dissecting the symbiotic relationship between the leader and his committed activist-followers. Good leaders attract committed activist-followers. In turn, these followers have a bottom-up role in empowering the leader by rallying support from the broader populace, resulting in a mass movement. This twoway leader-follower interaction can endogenously give rise to threshold effects: ‘small’ differences in leader ability have a dramatic impact on the prospects for change. Therefore, while underlying structural conditions and institutions are important, there is an independent first-order role for individual agency in bringing about institutional change and development. We show that for a leader ‘it is better to be feared than loved’. An ambitious, self-serving leader attracts activist-followers who fear bad institutional change and hope to insulate themselves by becoming loyal followers. Indeed by empowering such a self-serving leader, these followers make him a more effective agent of (both good and bad) institutional change.
论文可在此处下载： http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/faculty/sumon/Research.htm
