Thiers, ConsueloWehner, Leslie2023-05-262023-05-262023Thiers C, Wehner L. Britain’s COVID-19 battle: the role of political leaders in shaping the responses to the pandemic. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 2023 Aug;25(3):517-34. DOI: 10.1177/136914812311590211369-1481http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56991This 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.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13691481231159021Boris JohnsonCOVID-19 crisisLeadership stylesLeadership Trait Analysis (LTA)Nicola SturgeonPersonality traitsUnited Kingdominfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess