The questions: "who becomes a provincial premier?", "what is a premier's career pattern?", and "does selection process make a difference in the type of person that becomes premier?" are answered in this study. A series of 22 political and socio-economic variables was collected for each of the 185 men who have been provincial premiers between July 1, 1867 and July 1, 1987. After the data set was created, analysis by province and party was then performed. The response to "who becomes a provincial premier" shows that premiers are not typical of the electorate that they represent. Provincial premiers, on average, are Protestant lawyers who come to office at age 48.6. These men usually have a post-secondary education, and are born in the province of which they become premier. Three distinct career patterns are found when one answers the question "what is a premier's career pattern?". The first, and most common path, is the replacement of one premier by another while the party is in government. The second path, and the least frequented, is the "comeback" route. This occurs when an individual is in government, goes into the opposition, becomes party leader, and comes back to government as premier. The third path to the premiership is via the post of leader of the opposition. An individual following this path is leader of the opposition party and wins an election to become premier. Each of the 185 premiers followed one of these distinct paths to office. Parliamentary and cabinet experience, years as party leader before becoming premier, duration as premier, and reason for leaving the premiership each vary, when analyzed by path to power. The response to the third question is that the selection process makes a difference in the type of person that becomes premier. Convention chosen premiers, in contrast to caucus chosen premiers, are younger, have more diverse occupational backgrounds, and have less parliamentary and cabinet experience. Convention chosen leaders have a longer duration in office. Comparison of results with parallel studies of Australian state premiers, national party leaders, federal cabinet ministers, and provincial cabinet members, shows that Canadian provincial premiers are unique in their background and career progression. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Personality, situational and behavioural theories of political leadership fall short of explaining the interaction among the leader, the followers and the environment. In contrast, the transactional approach emphasizes this reciprocal process of social, cognitive and situational influences. Integrative complexity theory provides a framework and a methodology for studying this interaction and its effect on how people process information. This study focuses on the Canadian Prime Ministers as a population of political leaders worthy of investigation. In addition to studying their integrative complexity level, other aspects of value in understanding great leaders were examined. Based on items found in studies of American Presidents (Maranell, 1970; Schlesinger, 1962) the following dimensions were studied: difficulty, activeness, motivation, strength, effectiveness, prestige, innovativeness, flexibility, honesty and overall> accomplishments. Two sets of complexity scores (on prepared and spontaneous materials) were obtained in order to test the question: Whose complexity is being rated in prepared speeches — the writer's or the speaker's? Prepared speech scores came from the Response to the Speech from the Throne texts in Hansard, while spontaneous speech scores were based on extemporaneous responses to informal questions in the House of Commons. Two groups of experts (historians and political scientists) on Canadian leaders were approached for their opinions about the 16 Prime Ministers along the ten dimensions mentioned. An eleventh item was included as a check on the experts' knowledge of each leader. There was no difference between the prepared and spontaneous integrative complexity scores. Except for honesty, there were no correlations between complexity and the 11 dimensions rated by experts. The experts' ratings did not differ as a function of their discipline on 10 of the 11 scales. Only on the amount of information they had about each Prime Minister did the two groups differ. The difficulty of the political issues facing a Prime Minister had an effect on how he was rated on five dimensions: activeness, strength, effectiveness, innovativeness and accomplishments. Based on the four items found to be most predictive of greatness in American Presidents (i.e., strength, prestige, activeness and accomplishments), Canada's five greatest Prime Ministers are: Macdonald, Laurier, Borden, King and Trudeau. Both primacy and recency effects can be seen in these choices. The difficulty of the issues facing a Prime Minister had an impact on 3 of the 4 components contributing to greatness. The 5 Prime Ministers selected as great tended to rate high on the items which correspond to the 3 major dimensions (evaluative, activity, potency) of the semantic differential. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate