Why Leadership Matters

Moral individualisation of social problems is a dead end

If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one. - Lee Kuan Yew

In Nigeria, there is a familiar response to many of the observed social dysfunctions. When people complain about poor leadership, corruption, or institutional decay, they are often met with a rebuke: the people themselves are no better. Leaders, it is said, are drawn from society, not imported from elsewhere. A country with disorderly citizens should not expect orderly government. From this view follows a further conclusion, sometimes stated bluntly, sometimes implied. Nigerians deserve the leadership they get.

This argument gained renewed force over the December holidays, when social media was awash with complaints about the everyday behaviour of Nigerians. People shared videos and anecdotes of conduct that was widely regarded as embarrassing, selfish, or corrosive of basic social order. Passengers bought train tickets for specific seats, then occupied other seats and refused to move when the rightful holders arrived. Fellow passengers looked on, some indifferent, others quietly supportive, few willing to intervene. In queues, people routinely ignored any notion of first-come, first-served. At the slightest traffic congestion, drivers abandoned their lanes and drove into oncoming traffic, worsening the jam for everyone. Each of these episodes invites the same diagnosis. Nigerians lack discipline. Nigerians are morally deficient. Nigerians refuse to do the right thing even when they know it.

This diagnosis is appealing because it is simple and fits comfortably with our moral intuitions. We are used to explaining behaviour by reference to individual character and choice. If people act badly, then it must be because they are bad people, or at least insufficiently virtuous people. From this perspective, social improvement is a matter of moral reform. If only citizens would internalise better values, exercise more restraint, and choose to behave well, the society would improve. Some political leaders reinforce this view, calling for attitudinal change, civic reorientation, or moral rebirth.

The problem is that this way of thinking is largely mistaken. The behaviours in question are not well explained as failures of individual morality. They are better understood as failures of coordination. In each case, individuals face situations where their welfare depends heavily on the actions of others. Sitting in the correct train seat is beneficial if everyone else does the same. Queuing works if most people respect the queue. Staying in one’s lane during traffic is rational if other drivers do likewise. When these conditions hold, cooperation is easy and largely automatic. When they do not, the incentives change.

Games People Play

The kinds of behaviour described above are not random lapses or peculiar cultural defects. They follow a recognisable structure. Economists and game theorists describe this structure using the idea of coordination games. A coordination game is a situation in which each person’s best course of action depends on what they expect others to do. The payoffs are not determined solely by individual choice. They are produced jointly by patterns of behaviour that either align or clash.

Consider the simplest case. Everyone is better off if people follow the same rule. It does not especially matter which rule, as long as it is shared. Driving on the left or the right both work, but only if everyone does the same thing. Queuing is efficient if most people respect the queue. Sitting in assigned train seats works if passengers generally occupy only the seats they paid for. In these situations, coordination produces order at very low cost. No heroism is required. People comply because compliance is sensible, given that others comply.

The difficulty is that these games typically have more than one stable outcome. There is a good equilibrium in which most people follow the rule and everyone benefits. There is also a bad equilibrium, in which most people defect and everyone is worse off. Once a society drifts into the latter, individual incentives change. If you expect others to ignore seat assignments, insisting on your seat becomes costly and uncertain. If you expect people to jump the queue, queuing politely is an invitation to be pushed aside. If you expect drivers to invade oncoming lanes at the first sign of congestion, staying in your lane may mean not moving at all.

Traffic jams illustrate this logic particularly well. In principle, everyone would move faster if each driver stayed in their lane. In practice, once a few drivers defect and drive against traffic, others are forced to respond. Some drivers defect to avoid being disadvantaged. Others stay put and suffer the consequences. The overall result is worse congestion and more frustration. Yet no individual driver can solve the problem by behaving well in isolation. The outcome is shaped by expectations, not by individual moral resolve.

Train seating follows the same pattern. Assigned seating is a coordination device. It allows strangers to share a scarce resource without negotiation. When most passengers respect it, enforcement is almost unnecessary. When enough people stop respecting it, the system collapses into conflict and uncertainty. Those who comply bear the cost of compliance, while defectors benefit. Over time, expectations adjust, and even people who privately think the behaviour is wrong may pre-emptively defect.

This is what is meant by a coordination failure. Everyone would prefer a different collective outcome, but no one can reach it alone. The problem is not that people fail to see what is socially optimal. It is that the socially optimal outcome is no longer individually safe, given what they expect others to do. Behaviour becomes defensive. People act not according to how they wish society were organised, but according to how they believe it actually is.

When you think about it as a problem of coordination, much of everyday social behaviour is less a moral choice than a strategic response to shared expectations. This does not mean values are irrelevant, but it does mean that exhortation has limits. Telling people to be better citizens does not change the game they think they are playing. As long as individuals expect others to defect, behaviour that makes everyone worse off can remain stable, persistent, and resistant to moral appeal.

How Coordination Is Usually Achieved

In most societies, coordination problems do not remain permanently unresolved. People find ways, often gradual and unplanned, to converge on shared patterns of behaviour that allow everyday life to proceed with minimal friction. These solutions are rarely the result of explicit agreement or conscious design. They emerge through repeated interaction, shared experience, and the gradual alignment of expectations.

One familiar class of solutions consists of norms, customs, and conventions. These are not interchangeable terms, but they overlap in function. Each serves to reduce uncertainty about how others will act. When a practice becomes established, individuals no longer need to think too hard about every interaction. They rely instead on the expectation that others will behave as they have behaved before.

If coordination failures arise because individuals act on pessimistic expectations about one another, then their solution cannot lie in appeals to individual virtue alone. The problem is not that people do not know what would make everyone better off. It is because they do not believe others will act accordingly. Any serious account of how coordination failures are resolved must therefore focus on how expectations change, not on how preferences are purified.

The central insight from the theory of coordination is that people coordinate easily when they come to expect others to behave in a particular way, and when those expectations are mutually recognised. Once such expectations are in place, behaviour becomes self-reinforcing. Individuals comply not because they are morally enlightened, but because compliance is the best response to what they reasonably expect others to do.

A key mechanism in this process is the emergence of what Thomas Schelling called focal points. A focal point is a solution that stands out as a natural point of convergence, not because it is objectively better, but because it is salient in a shared way. Salience may arise from precedent, visibility, simplicity, or cultural prominence. A familiar landmark becomes a meeting place not because it is optimal in some abstract sense, but because everyone expects everyone else to think of it.

Precedent is especially powerful. Once a coordination problem has been solved successfully in the past, that solution acquires a privileged status. People come to expect it to be repeated, precisely because it has been repeated before. Over time, this expectation becomes self-reinforcing. The history of successful coordination does the work that rational calculation alone cannot.

However, not all coordination problems are resolved in this way. Some persist because no focal point emerges, or because multiple competing focal points exist. In such cases, expectations remain fragmented. Individuals may recognise that a different pattern of behaviour would make everyone better off, yet still act defensively because they cannot rely on others to follow suit. The absence of a shared focal point means there is no safe path out of the bad equilibrium.

Leadership and the Rule of Law

If coordination problems persist because expectations fail to align, then the question becomes how expectations ever change at all. Shifts occur when something intervenes in the web of beliefs that sustains existing patterns of behaviour. One such intervention is the law. When focal points do not naturally emerge, formal rules are used as a coordination device.

Formal rules or the law are usually seen as a system of command backed by the coercive threat of punishment by a central authority. But economist Kaushik Basu has argued that the law is a coordinating tool for shaping expectations. In this framework, laws do not change what people are capable of doing. They operate instead by signalling how people are expected to behave. A law succeeds only if it becomes a focal point that people believe others will recognise and act upon.

This perspective helps explain why so many laws fail in practice and just exist as ink on paper. Citizens do not comply because they do not expect others to comply. Officials do not enforce because they do not expect other officials to enforce. Many laws fail because they are unjust or poorly drafted. But many more fail because they did not anchor expectations. When laws are general, stable, and consistently applied, they allow individuals to form reliable expectations about how others will act. Law enforcement is also central to coordination problems. Police officers, judges, and bureaucrats are not external enforcers acting on society from the outside. They are participants in the same coordination game. In environments where officials expect colleagues to tolerate non-enforcement, corruption and lawlessness can become self-sustaining.

Leadership is another way of coordinating when focal points do not arise automatically. Someone, or some institution, must make a particular equilibrium salient, credible, and publicly recognisable. Leadership is political entrepreneurship. A leader does not create new incentives out of nothing. Instead, they select from among existing possibilities and make one of them stand out as the one others will follow.

A leader's role is a structural one, which is to realign beliefs across the population, including within the state itself. When successful, it can move society from a bad equilibrium to a better one without changing underlying preferences or incentives. When absent or incoherent, coordination failures persist even when everyone recognises that the outcome is collectively harmful.

So next time you see people complain about poor political leadership in the country, even while they behave in a way you disapprove. Perhaps you should think of it less as an individual moral abdication of their responsibilities, and more as a desire for a new focal point out of a bad equilibrium.