Who to Vote: The Preferred Leadership Styles and Policy Priorities of the Cagayan De Oro City Electorate

People vote for a candidate based on several leadership styles, characteristics, and priorities they wish to address. The study is descriptive-correlational and designed to identify voters’ preferred leadership style and policy priorities in Cagayan de Oro City. The objective is to discover the voters’ preferences to understand their political behavior. It is anchored on the rational choice theory of Anthony Downs and Adam Smith (1957), the theory of political representation by Suzanne Dovi (2018), emotional intelligence theory and the Typology of Leadership Styles by Daniel Goleman (2000), and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study was structured to discover if there is a significant relationship between the voters’ preferred leadership styles and their preferred policy priorities. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was utilized for statistical analysis of data. The study found that the voters highly prefer all leadership styles: commanding, visionary, democratic, affiliative, pacesetting, and coaching. The study also discovered that the voters strongly prefer high-quality education, agriculture, food security, and nutrition as policy priorities. Finally, the result of the test of correlation showed a significant moderate positive relationship with r= 0.557 between leadership style and policy priorities. Based on the findings, it can be deduced that preferred leadership style and policy priorities can be used as a basis for determining the political behavior of voters. The leadership styles of leaders moderately define their policy priorities and vice versa.

Keywords: Electorate, Leadership Style, Policy Priorities, Voters