Who is Fit to Govern? Citizen Perceptions of Leadership Qualifications in Governance: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Citizen evaluations of who is fit to govern are central to democratic legitimacy, especially in local governance, where public authority is experienced through everyday services and community decisions. This systematic literature review synthesized empirical evidence on how citizens define, interpret, and evaluate leadership qualifications in governance. Guided by the PICo framework and a PRISMA 2020-aligned process, the review examined citizens, voters, residents, service users, and community members; citizens' perceptions of leadership qualifications; and governance contexts, with an emphasis on local governance. A total of 549 records were screened using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. From 232 broadly included studies, 53 core studies were retained for final thematic synthesis after MMAT-informed appraisal and second-stage refinement. Findings show that citizens assess leadership fitness through a multidimensional framework. Integrity and anti-corruption credibility operate as threshold qualifications, while competence is judged through service delivery, responsiveness, problem-solving, communication, and administrative performance. Trust, participation, accountability, and perceived public-service orientation further shape citizens' views of leaders' qualifications. Unlike prior meta-analyses that quantify the association between a single governance construct (e.g., trust or satisfaction) and an outcome, this review's principal contribution is the Ethical-Capability Legitimacy model, which explains how moral credibility and practical performance combine sequentially and reciprocally to produce citizen judgments of leadership fitness, rather than merely cataloging the dimensions citizens mention. The review followed PRISMA 2020 reporting standards for identification, screening, and synthesis, adapted to a narrative rather than meta-analytic design because no quantitative pooling of effect sizes was undertaken. The review concludes that leadership qualification is publicly constructed through the interaction of ethical trust and practical capability. Effective governance therefore, depends on leaders who are not only technically competent but also perceived as accountable, inclusive, responsive, and committed to public welfare.