Leaders Personalities And The Outcomes Of Democratic Elections

The conventional wisdom purveyed by the press and television and accepted as true by most politicians is that elections throughout the democratic world are personal clashes between individual presidential candidates and party leaders. Almost everyone assumes that election outcomes are frequently determined by the major candidates' personal characteristics. In the United States, Al Gore in 2000 came over as aloof and arrogant­­and failed to win his expected victory. In Great Britain, Tony Blair in 2001 came across as dynamic and personable­­and won a second term. So personal charisma appears to yield electoral success. This study by eminent scholars on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Survey research conducted in recent decades indicates that relatively few voters are swayed by candidates1 personal characteristics. Far more important are voters' longstanding party loyalties, their views on issues, and their judgments of how well or badly presidents and parties have performed­­or will perform­­in office. The votes of even the few electors who are swayed by candidates' personalities usually cancel each other out. As a result, election outcomes are seldom decided by individual candidates' personal images. Occasionally, but not often. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton owed their election victories more to economics than to charm. At the end of World War II, the charismatic Winston Churchill lost the 1945 British general election; the colorless Clement Attlee won. Chancellor Helmut Kohl remained in power in Germany for a generation-but was never personally popular. Russian voters reckoned that Boris Yeltsin could not hold his drink- but nevertheless elected him. The implications of the authors' analyses are profound. They suggest that modern democratic politics is not nearly as candidate-centered and personality-oriented as is often supposed. They also suggest that parties' policies and their performance in office usually count for far more than the men and women they choose as their leaders. Not least, the authors suggest that the efforts of political consultants, advertising agencies, and spin doctors are often misdirected.

Based on extensive data sets from national election studies in nine major democracies, this book brings together leading experts to assess the impact of political leaders on voting patterns. This is the first major book-length treatment of the importance of leaders' personality on the outcome of democratic elections.

Campaign organizers and the media appear to agree that voters' perceptions of party leaders have an important impact in elections: considerable effort is made to ensure that leaders look good, speak well, and that they are up in the polls. In contrast, the academic literature is much more divided. Some suggest that leaders play an important role in the vote calculus, while others argue that in comparison to other factors, perceptions of leaders have only a minimal impact. This study incorporates data from thirty-five election studies across seven countries with varying institutional environments, and takes both a broad and in-depth look at the role of leaders. A few noteworthy conclusions emerge. First, voters evaluate leaders' traits in terms of two main dimensions, character and competence. Second, voters perceive leaders within the framework of a partisan stereotype in which the party label of the leader imbues meaning; more specifically, leaders of Conservative parties are seen to be more competent while Left leaders are seen to have more character. Third, and most importantly, leaders matter: they affect voters' decisions and have a discernible effect on the distribution of votes in an election. Fourth, there are consistent differences in the perception of party leaders according to voters' level of political sophistication. While all voters evaluate party leaders and consider leaders in their vote calculus, the more sophisticated do so the most. This book argues that personality plays an important role in elections, and that in a healthy democracy, so it should. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr The Comparative Politics Series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

Voter perceptions of the personal traits of presidential candidates are widely regarded to be important influences on the vote. Media pundits frequently explain the outcome of presidential elections in terms of the personal appeal of the candidates. Despite the emphasis on presidential character traits in the media, the scholarly investigation in this area is limited. In this book, David Holian and Charles Prysby set out to examine the effect that trait perceptions have on the vote, how these perceptions are shaped by other attitudes and evaluations, and what types of voters are most likely to cast a ballot on the basis of the character traits of the presidential candidates. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys, the authors find that traits do have a very substantial effect on the vote, that different candidates have advantages on different traits, and that the opinions expressed by media pundits about how the candidates are viewed by the voters are often simplistic, and sometimes quite mistaken. Character traits are important to voters, but we need a better and more complete understanding of how and why these factors influence voters. An essential read which provides a clear and original argument to all those interested in furthering their understanding of the importance of candidate character traits for the quality of American elections and democracy.

Outcomes of legislative elections are typically reported in terms of party support: how many votes and seats were obtained by each party? But in fact voters are faced with three choices which must be folded into one. They must decide which party they prefer, but in so doing they must take account of the policies advocated by these parties and the leaders who will eventually have to enact them. This simple fact raises question about the relative weight of these considerations, and espeically the importance granted to the leaders. This issue has been largely neglected in the vast literature on voting behaviour.The dominant traditions in the study of voting behaviour focus on political parties and party identification; and on political issues and ideology, respectively. This volume uses election surveys over the past 50 years to systematically assesses the impact of political leaders on voting decisions in nine democracies (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States). It analyses issues such as the changes in political communication (particularly the rise of televized politics), and the relative importance accorded to political leaders in different types of political systems. It demonstrates how electoral systems and other political institutions have a discernible effect on the importance voters accord to actual political leaders. Contrary to popular wisdom, Political Leaders and Democratic Elections shows how unimportant the characteristics of political leaders, parties, and indeed the voters themselves actually are on voting patterns. The volume shows that voters tend to let themselves be guided by the leaders they like rather than being pushed away from those they dislike. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

Using an innovative framework for the study of voting behavior in parliamentary democracies, this book sheds new light on the ongoing personalization of politics. The analysis makes use of national election study data from Britain, Germany and The Netherlands and shows that party leaders can often be the difference between victory and defeat.

Personality Politics? assesses the role that voters' perceptions and evaluations of leaders play in democratic elections. The book presents evidence from an array of countries with diverse historical and institutional contexts, and employs innovative methodologies to determine the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. Addressing such questions as 'Where do leaders effects come from?', 'In which institutional contexts are leader effects more important?' and, 'To which kinds of voters are leaders a more prominent factor for voting behaviour?', the authors seek to determine whether the roles leaders play enhances or damages the electoral process, and what impact this has on the quality of democracy in electoral democracies today.

Can election results be explained, given that each ballot reflects the influence of countless impressions, decisions, and attachments? Leading young scholars of political behaviour piece together a comprehensive portrait of the modern Canadian voter to reveal the challenges of understanding election results. By systematically exploring the long-standing attachments, short-term influences, and proximate factors that influence our behaviour in the voting booth, this theoretically grounded and methodologically advanced collection sheds new light on the choices we make as citizens and provides important insights into recent national developments.