Political Roles and Activities of Former Presidents and Prime Ministers

Over the last century, thanks to the greater number of independent countries and longer human life spans, there is a larger pool of former presidents and prime ministers than at any time in history. The existence of this unusual collection of political figures—at once publicly renowned and potentially influential yet technically powerless—has triggered several lines of academic research. Scholars have asked whether the prospect of life-after-office shapes policy choices of leaders while they are in office, and if so how. This line of inquiry includes studies of both dictators and democratically elected presidents and prime ministers. In addition, scholars have examined what political leaders who retire, are term-limited, or are defeated in running for reelection—that is, democratic politicians—actually do after they are out of office. Three issues are thought to be uppermost in their minds: the mundane personal question of how to support themselves and their families; the somewhat loftier reputational issue of how to secure their standing and place in history; and the delicate political matter of how to deploy their accumulated skill and experience usefully and tactfully, without causing trouble to themselves or their political allies and enterprises. Finally, an emerging line of research examines how the increasingly large number of ex-presidents and former prime ministers in the world contribute to shaping global policy debates and institutions. In fact, however, all of this together does not constitute a large body of research and the student in this field is obliged to resort very quickly to primary sources, from self-serving memoirs and fawning mission statements to hostile investigative reporting and unfriendly partisan journalism; the compensatory reward is much livelier prose than the conventional academic treatise.