World View : The Leadership Revolution : Old regimes are shoved out. New faces and ideas crowd in. As Clinton takes office, the globe’s voters are changing the rules for who rules nations.

Beekeepers, novelists and musicians in Europe, cinematographers and teachers in Asia, trade union chiefs and poets in Africa, talk show hosts and charismatic evangelists in Latin America--the new faces emerging in leadership positions around the world over the past three years are as striking as the changes in ideologies.

Indeed, the change in the White House tomorrow, when Bill Clinton is inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States, takes place at a time that the very concept of political leadership is going through a metamorphosis.

In the short term, the transformation is altering everything from the types of leaders and the way they emerge to the length, conditions and style of their rule. Individual leaders increasingly face shorter times to accomplish more, for example, while input from voters in forums like referenda and town meetings are increasingly dictating agendas.

The long-term effect could ultimately shift the balance of power within states at both the local and national level in entirely new directions.

And in general, the importance of leadership is growing as leaders replace ideologies as the primary source of direction for the issues on those agendas in the 1990s.

The combined impact is changing the Old Guard globally. From the vast ranges of Australia to the rain forests of Zambia, longstanding leaders have been unceremoniously ousted since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 signaled the onset of global upheaval.

“It’s not just George Bush. Leaders in major countries around the world are in trouble,” said John D. Steinbrunner, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. Indeed, even leaders of Europe’s three most powerful countries--Germany, France and Britain--are all facing serious challenges.

And the pace of change is often dizzying. Within a year of being chosen Time’s “Man of the Decade,” Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was replaced by Boris N. Yeltsin in 1991. A short year later, Yeltsin is in political trouble.

Some of the recent changes--and others yet to come--are part of history’s cycle as the leadership mantle passes to a new generation, or as the democratic process seeks renewal in new faces and fresh approaches.

The end of political eras and wars are also particularly prone to leadership shifts. One of the 20th Century’s most celebrated figures, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, lost his post just two months after World War II--the very event that set his place in history because of his strong leadership. Likewise, the factors that abruptly ended the Cold War will probably be viewed by history as playing a role in President Bush’s defeat.

Yet the magnitude and range of current shifts in leadership are strikingly different. “These changes are more than just the pendulum swinging,” said Erik Peterson, director of studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Several distinct new trends are emerging:

First, leaders are changing as constituencies shift, particularly as interest groups multiply and their causes diversify.

Second, contenders for leadership are proliferating as powers--and therefore positions--devolve from traditional elites to formerly excluded strata of society and to political outsiders.

Third, the role of leaders is being redefined as both domestic and international priorities shift.

Finally, heightened public expectations and demands for accountability are putting unprecedented pressure on leaders in ways that both improve and endanger traditional forms of governance. Collective action is also offering new alternatives.

The most significant change in leadership stems from shifts emanating not from the top or even the middle but from the bottom: Leadership is evolving foremost because power is spreading.

Two centuries after the Enlightenment, the dreams of equality and enfranchisement are finally penetrating the Earth’s far corners. Since the first cracks in the Berlin Wall, a record 139 of the world’s 190 countries have held a free election or a multi-party transition election--at least 42 of them for the first time since World War II or the first time ever.

As a result, more people in more countries were empowered between 1989 and 1992 than in any equivalent period in history--more than 530 million, according to Freedom House, which monitors democracy and human rights around the world. Another 300 million live in countries which made significant strides toward political pluralism.

“We’re seeing a radical devolution of power that has probably not yet peaked and will therefore be a trademark of the years to come,” Steinbrunner said.

The reallocation of authority has already opened the way for whole new categories of people once on the political fringe, or outside it, to participate in selecting their leaders.

In a host of countries, the number of parties is rapidly proliferating. Last year, 92 parties applied to run in Peru’s parliamentary elections, while 54 parties ran in Algeria’s first free parliamentary contest since independence from France. In 1991, Poland’s first free parliamentary election since World War II ended with 29 diverse parties winning seats.

But it’s not just a numbers game. Party platforms are also increasingly diverse. As ideological differences diminish worldwide, voting blocs once defined as left or right are being replaced by a wider array of interest or issue groups focusing on everything from peasant rights to air pollution and from family planning to public prayer--Christian, Muslim or Jewish.

In many regions, the selection system is also no longer strictly dominated by older men from mainstream elites.

In Hungary, the new Alliance of Young Democrats, or Fidesz, is a party restricted to people under 35. In 1990, it won 23 parliamentary seats and nine mayoral seats, making it the fourth-largest party. By 1992, however, a Gallup poll showed that the youth movement had broader public backing than any of its political competition. The next competitor was 20 points behind.

The world’s first major female party, the Women’s Alliance, was founded in 1983. In 1991, it won five seats in Iceland’s 63-member Althing, the world’s oldest ongoing Parliament. By then, other women’s parties had also been founded in Sweden, Belgium, Spain and Holland--and a record nine women were either president or prime minister in Bangladesh, Dominica, the Dutch Antilles, France, Iceland, Ireland, Nicaragua, Norway and the Philippines.

In Norway, the prime minister, half her Cabinet, the leaders of two large opposition parties, 59 of the 165 members of Parliament and both candidates running for mayor of Oslo in 1991 were all female. Even in theocratic Iran the number of women elected last April to Iran’s Parliament rose from three to nine.

“Every cut of society is developing a self-consciousness, which leads to a higher degree of diversity in politics,” Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock” and “Powershift,” said in an interview.

“(Franklin) Roosevelt had maybe half a dozen constituencies, whereas Clinton had to pull together thousands of groups, including gays and black-lung victims, to win. Leaders of the future will have to attend to more groups and more constituencies.”

More Diversity

The redistribution of power has in turn led to more diverse leaders as new constituencies tap their own representatives and particularly as they reject conventional candidates, ideologues and dynasts because of “festering alienation and deepening contempt for all political parties,” according to Toffler.

Indeed, outsiders, even occasional oddballs, are increasingly the rule rather than the exception as alienated or frustrated voters turn to those untainted by traditional politics--or even, as in the United States, tapping provincial leaders to become national figures.

As all of South America became democratic for the first time in 1990, Alberto Fujimori, an obscure agronomist whose parents fled from Japan to Lima during World War II, won a stunning upset over the country’s best-known writer to become Peru’s president. A year earlier, Carlos Saul Menem, the son of Syrian immigrants who converted to Catholicism from Islam, defied his own Peronist party, which didn’t support him, to become Argentina’s president.

The changes are not just at the top. Since 1989, Nicaraguans have elected a coffee grower to be mayor of Managua, while Turks voted for a former soap opera queen to be mayor of a key Istanbul suburb, and the mayor of Lima is the Phil Donahue of Peru.

After the Berlin Wall came down but before unification with the West, East Germany’s first free elections brought a plumber, a female beekeeper and several ecologists into Parliament.

The choices often reveal “the depths of the gap between leadership and citizens,” according to R. Bruce McColm, executive director of Freedom House in New York.

In India, where the popularity of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the dominant Congress Party was waning, the candidates for Parliament in 1991 spanned the spectrum from a brothel owner to Hindu fundamentalists. They also included a former king and his mother--running for different parties--several sports and movie stars, an aging world body-building champion and a murderer who took credit for 150 deaths before giving up a life of crime.

“In both emerging and developed democracies there is a perception that government doesn’t work and can’t produce what it promises. It’s gone beyond voting for an alternative. People are actually registering protests that the system itself is not functioning by turning to people outside it,” McColm said.

Outsiders Favored

In some cases, outsiders are either necessary or natural choices. To fill the leadership vacuum after communism’s demise, democratization brought playwright Vaclav Havel to power in Czechoslovakia, writer and translator Arpad Goncz in Hungary, philosopher Zhelyu Zhelev in Bulgaria and music scholar Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania.

“The reason you have people adopting someone like Havel is that they want moral leadership. These kinds of outsiders also validate the process of change,” McColm added.

But he noted that in many cases, outsiders serve only as transition figures, often because they can’t tangibly produce the change they represent. By the end of 1992, Havel had resigned and voters had ousted Landsbergis.

After the phenomenon of empowerment and its byproducts, the other profound changes in leadership are largely because of the realignment of priorities around the issues shaping a new era.

Shifts in sources of individual identity from states to smaller ethnic or religious communities, for example, have given greater prominence to leaders ranging from Slovak nationalists to Zulu chiefs and centuries-old Cossack clans.

Before a military coup suspended Algeria’s experiment with pluralism last year, an Islamic party came in first and a party of ethnic Berbers second in the initial round of parliamentary elections. In India’s 1991 election, the Hindu fundamentalist party captured the second-largest vote, making it the official opposition in the world’s most populous secular democracy.

And Communist hard-liners like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov have managed to hang on to power by switching the basis of their legitimacy--and public appeal--from leftist ideology to right-wing nationalism.

Follow the Money

Leaders emerging out of nationalist and religious passions have grabbed larger headlines, but the more important issue in long-term leadership choices may be quite technical. As economic strength replaces military might as the main barometer of power, economics is increasingly influencing leadership choices and the situations from which new faces, like Bill Clinton, emerge.

In Australia, the popularity of four-term Prime Minister Bob Hawke plummeted in 1991 largely because of a deep recession. He was ousted by his own Labor Party and replaced by his own government’s former treasurer, Paul Keating, the architect of Australia’s economic liberalization.

Last October, after its 15-year civil war, Lebanon turned to Rafik Hariri--a local businessman widely known as the Ross Perot of Beirut because he became a billionaire doing business in Saudi Arabia--as the new prime minister.

“The end of the Cold War has devalued the importance of traditional military and security issues. Economic issues are now the driving force of domestic affairs as well as overall international relations, and therefore a critical component in what kind of people are chosen to lead,” said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

In several places, pledges to open up stagnant economies or to end corruption have led to leadership upheavals. In Zambia, the 27-year rule of President Kenneth Kaunda ended in 1991 when trade union leader Frederick Chiluba swept the vote by tapping into economic weariness. In the Bahamas, Hubert A. Ingraham ended the 25-year rule of Lynden O. Pindling last September by promising to privatize state businesses and end high-level corruption.

Indeed, economics have become so central to leadership choices that they have already led to a backlash against some of the world’s new leaders.

Lithuania, the first Soviet republic to break away in 1990, also became the first to veer back toward socialism in 1992, largely because of unrest from fuel shortages, soaring prices and rising unemployment as industries collapsed. A survey showed that 70% of Lithuanians, including the prime minister’s family, lived on less than $13 a month.

As a result, former Communists won the most votes--and about one-third of the 141 seats in Parliament--last October in the first election since independence. Because of economic pressures, even the new government’s foreign minister is an economist, not a politician, and his main task is bringing in foreign investment, not diplomacy.

In Venezuela, South America’s oldest democracy, two coups last year against President Carlos Andres Perez were almost entirely triggered by economic decline, including a 30% drop in middle-class incomes since 1989.

“The half-life of many leaders is going to be reduced in the years ahead because it’s going to be increasingly difficult for leaders to respond effectively to rapidly changing economic and political situations,” said Peterson of Washington’s Center for Strategic and

International Studies.

“People want results, and they want those results quickly.”

In fact, all the latest leadership trends share one common denominator: Leaders everywhere are being held to ever-higher standards, and when they fail, they are increasingly being held to account.

Even outsider status offers no guarantees. In March, 1990, Fernando Collor de Mello became Brazil’s first popularly elected president--and the first not to have the support of a major party. Collor’s anti-corruption message and his promise to break with the past led voters to opt for a dark horse outsider to run the world’s fifth-largest state.

But by last September, Collor was out. After he and his family were charged with nepotism and accepting massive bribes, Brazil decided not to wait until the next election. In a 441-to-38 vote, Collor was impeached by Brazil’s lower house. Last month, he finally decided to resign rather than fight the overwhelming opposition.

The new accountability is not limited to corruption. Constituents are also increasingly rejecting sources and symbols of authority that try to exclude them or deprive them of recently acquired power.

In May, 1991, Georgia was the first former Soviet republic to hold multi-party elections. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a veteran human rights activist widely credited with helping to end Communist rule, won more than 86% of the popular vote.

But less than eight months later, he was forced to hide in an underground bunker in Parliament to protect himself from opponents besieging his office. Gamsakhurdia’s authoritarian rule and his failed reforms cost him the support of even his own Cabinet and police chief.

“Now you have a global citizenry plugged into various information technology, so their expectations are enormous--and a very powerful pressure on leaders,” McColm said.

Even Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, who has masterfully held together a fractious and multifaceted movement since the late 1960s, faces growing pressure to share power and to account for everything from his decisions to PLO funds.

On the other extreme, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II bowed last year to public questioning of the monarchy’s value when she broke centuries-old tradition and agreed to pay taxes and cut some royals from the state payroll.

“We’re likely to see more of this around the world,” McColm said. “Leaders will have to constantly legitimize themselves and re-energize support for their policies by persuading citizenry in extra-constitutional ways, like media forums and economic summits,” a reference to tactics that helped Clinton convince the U.S. electorate.

But trying to stay one step ahead--or trying to shape public opinion rather than having to account later on--can also cost valuable time and divert attention. The danger of constantly having to convince, McColm noted, is that substance can be subsumed by process, “and then there’s little time for real governance.”

Safety in Numbers

The most unusual new form of leadership, however, combines both empowerment and accountability to produce community, collective or group leadership. Although grass-roots actions are hardly new, this trend differs from the “people power” of Beijing’s 1989 Tian An Men Square uprising or the 1986 anti-Marcos campaign in the Philippines because the movements usually lack traditional leadership, ideology and even conventional structure.

Also, courtesy of a global revolution in mass communications, these movements form faster and spread further than public protests of a bygone era. They tend to spring up in response to specific problems and last until those problems are resolved.

Last month, up to 80% of Venezuelans boycotted regional and municipal elections to show disgust with the government. On the other extreme, Siberian miners suddenly went on strike in 1989 over working conditions, a movement that swept the nation and ultimately forced Moscow to concede in ways that helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent Soviet demise.

And last fall, even the usually deferential and passive Japanese reacted with public anger in demonstrations, petition drives and even acts of aggression to evidence linking politicians with mobsters--and eventually forced Japan’s leading powerbroker to quit politics and Parliament.

Should group leaderships evolve into long-term rather than transitory phenomena--as they began to do among miners in the Soviet Union until the state collapsed--they have the potential to become a vital and vibrant leadership alternative.

Ask the People

In the future other forms of leadership are likely to emerge, in turn also affecting structures of governance. The growing tendency to hold referenda, for example, is shifting decision-making powers from executive or congressional representatives to individuals.

The practice, made popular in California, has now spread throughout Western democracies--often with potent results.

In two stunning referenda last year, Canadians rejected a proposition, supported by all three national parties, to prevent the country from fragmenting into pieces, while Danes rejected a government-endorsed plan to approve the Maastricht Treaty providing greater political and economic union within the European Community.

Chiefs of state once strong enough to lead without facing serious challenge are increasingly now turning to referenda to legitimate their agendas--and, effectively, their right to leadership.

South African President Frederik W. de Klerk, for example, was forced to call for a referendum among white voters last year to endorse reforms before he could negotiate with blacks on a new multiracial government.

And Yeltsin, under fire last month from Russia’s Parliament on the pace and direction of change, felt compelled to call for a referendum to let the public decide which branch of government had the last word. Only a tentative compromise preempted it; given the ongoing tension, it may yet take place.

And in the U.S. election last November, Americans voted on some 69 referenda ranging from gay rights to congressional term limitations.

Representative democracy is increasingly giving way to direct democracy, a trend facilitated in no small part by a communications revolution that provides global information directly to electorates in a way intelligence channels once informed leaders.

“The media has accelerated the demand for decisions and set the rhythm of political discourse,” Toffler said. Most recently, media images of starving Somalis ignited public concern and, in turn, strongly influenced the Bush Administration to launch Operation Restore Hope.

The bottom line, U.S. analysts contend, is that the 1990s may be just as interesting for the changes in forms of leadership as in the individuals who are selected to lead.

“The growing complexity and speed (of change) make it difficult to govern in the old way,” Toffler said. “It’s like a computer blowing fuses. Our existing political decision-making structures are now recognized to be obsolete.”

The changes so far, he added, are “only the beginning.”

The Map of Freedom

In just four years, more than 40 nations with nearly 530 million people have been newly empowered to vote in free or multi-party transition elections. This development has opened up the political process to new groups and leaders.

Free or multi-party elections since 1989

(held for the first time ever or the first time since World War II)

Country Population* (millions) 1. Albania 3.3 2. Algeria 26.0 3. Angola 8.9 4. Armenia 3.5 5. Azerbaijan 7.1 6. Belarus 10.3 7. Benin 5.0 8. Bosnia-Herzegovina 4.2 9. Bulgaria 8.9 10. Cape Verde 0.4 11. Congo 2.4 12. Croatia 4.6 13. Czech Republic 10.4 14. East Germany 16.7** 15. Estonia 1.6 16. Gabon 1.1 17. Georgia 5.5 18. Haiti 6.4 19. Hungary 10.3 20. Jordan 3.6 21. Kenya 26.2 22. Kyrgyzstan 4.5 23. Latvia 2.7 24. Lithuania 3.7 25. Macedonia 1.9 26. Mali 8.5 27. Marshall Islands 0.05 28. Micronesia 0.1 29. Mongolia 2.3 30. Myanmar 42.5 31. Namibia 1.5 32. Nicaragua .4.1 33. Poland 38.4 34. Romania 22.8 35. Russia 148.5*** 36. Sao Tome & Principe 0.1 37. Slovakia 5.3 38. Slovenia 2.0 39. Tajikistan 5.5 40. Ukraine 52.1 41. Yugoslavia 10.0 42. Zambia 8.4

* Mostly mid-’92 estimates ** Pre-unification 1989 estimate *** January, 1991 estmate Sources: Freedom House; 1993 Information Please Almanac; Europa World Yearbook 1992.