Britain's COVID-19 battle: The role of political leaders in shaping the responses to the pandemic.

This article introduces an analytical framework to trace and compare leaders' different types of behaviours to the health crisis posed by COVID-19, following the analytical benefits of Leadership Trait Analysis. It examines Boris Johnson's and Nicola Sturgeon's diverging initial responses to the pandemic's onset. We employ the Leadership Trait Analysis to shed light on three main differences in their respective leadership styles: risk-proneness versus risk-aversion; flexibility versus rigidity and rule advocacy versus rule ambivalence. Crises are one of the more fruitful situations in which to study leaders as their personal characteristics become central to the decision-making process. Thus, we employ an agent-centred and political psychology approach to analyse leaders' behaviour and make sense of their divergent management styles. The results show that the differences between these leaders' approaches to handling this global health crisis can be partly explained by their level of openness to information and their task versus relationship focus.

The "I" in BRICS: leadership traits of Indian prime ministers and India's role adaptation to rising status in world politics.

This paper inquires theoretically into how leaders act and react to the state role of rising power through the case study of India. It brings together role theory and leadership trait analysis, and contends that there is a puzzling interplay between rising status and leaders' characteristics. We project that leaders' traits and styles condition how they enact roles. India and its leaders offer a suitable case for investigating this issue. Since the economically unstable early 1990s, India has gone through a relatively successful era of global emergence. Thus, we examine the relationship between India's roles and the leadership profiles of Prime Ministers Atal Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narenda Modi, specifically their belief in the ability to control events and the need for power. We find especially in Vajpayee and Singh that their traits can help explain India's foreign policy roles and in Modi (first term only) a leader vulnerable to contextual winds. We argue that the interplay of leaders' traits and roles, as expressions of both material and social dimensions, helps assess how they make sense of their country's rising within both the regional and international systems.