Abstract
This chapter presents a first case study of disjunctive prime ministerial leadership, focused on the period between 1923 and 1940. It begins by specifying the characteristics of the interwar regime and then moves on to identify the general vulnerabilities this regime encountered after 1923. The premierships of Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, and Neville Chamberlain are then considered in sequence to examine how these prime ministers engaged with the dilemmas of disjunctive leadership. It is argued that each prime minister possessed agency but that economic, ideational, and institutional constraints rendered many potential options problematic. While Baldwin and MacDonald managed to preserve the interwar regime in an enervated state, Chamberlain was unable to manage the intersection of the regime’s domestic and external vulnerabilities.
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Byrne, C., Randall, N., Theakston, K. (2020). Disjunctive Leadership in Interwar Britain: Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, and Neville Chamberlain. In: Disjunctive Prime Ministerial Leadership in British Politics. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44911-7_2
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