The Politics Of Party Leadership

Making use of a unique data set that includes more than 1000 leadership elections from over 100 parties in 14 countries over an almost 50 year period, this volume provides the first comprehensive, comparative examination of how parties choose their leaders and the impact of the different decisions they make in this regard. Among the issues examined are how leaders are chosen, the factors that result in parties changing their selection rules, how the rules affect the competitiveness of leadership elections, the types of leaders chosen, the impact of leadership transition on electoral outcomes, the factors affecting the length of leadership tenures, and how leadership tenures come to an end This volume is situated in the literature on intra-party decision making and party organizational reform and makes unique and important contributions to our understanding of these areas. The analysis includes parties in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom. 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.

This book studies party leaders from selection to post-presidency. Based on data covering a large set of Western countries, and focusing on the trends of personalisation of politics, the volume is one of the first empirical investigations into how party leaders are elected, how long they stay in office, and whether they enter and guide democratic governments. It also provides novel data on how leaders end their career in a broad and diverse range of business activities. Topics covered include political leaders’ increasing autonomy, their reinforcement of popular legitimation, often through the introduction of direct election by party rank and file, and their grip on party organization. The book will appeal to students and scholars interested in political parties, political leadership, the transformation of democracy, and comparative politics.

This book explores the ways in which political parties, in contemporary parliamentary democracies, choose their leaders and then subsequently hold them accountable. The authors provide a comprehensive examination of party leadership selection and accountability both through examination of parties and countries in different institutional settings and through a holistic analysis of the role of party leaders and the methods through which they assume, and exit, the office. The collection includes essays on Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway and the United Kingdom which have important differences in their party systems, their degree of democratization, the role assigned to party leaders and their methods of leadership selection. Each country examination provides significant data relating to party rules and norms of leadership selection, leadership tenures and leadership contests. The book concludes with a chapter that merges the country data analyses to provide a truly comparative examination of the theoretical questions underlying the volume. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of legislative studies, elections, democracy, political parties, party systems, political elites and comparative politics.

This book explores the ways in which political parties, in contemporary parliamentary democracies, choose their leaders and then subsequently hold them accountable. The authors provide a comprehensive examination of party leadership selection and accountability both through examination of parties and countries in different institutional settings and through a holistic analysis of the role of party leaders and the methods through which they assume, and exit, the office. The collection includes essays on Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway and the United Kingdom which have important differences in their party systems, their degree of democratization, the role assigned to party leaders and their methods of leadership selection. Each country examination provides significant data relating to party rules and norms of leadership selection, leadership tenures and leadership contests. The book concludes with a chapter that merges the country data analyses to provide a truly comparative examination of the theoretical questions underlying the volume. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of legislative studies, elections, democracy, political parties, party systems, political elites and comparative politics.

The book provides a comprehensive view on the internal life of parties and investigates the dynamics of intra-party politics in different party environments to explain in which circumstances the party leader is more or less bound by the wills of party factions. Analyzing almost 500 intra-party documents from Italy, Germany and France, it presents a theory of intra-party politics that illuminates internal decision-making processes and sheds light on the outcomes of factional conflicts on the allocation of payoffs within the party, on the risk of a party split and on the survival of the party leader. Using text analysis, the results show that consensual dynamics can allow to preserve party unity and that directly elected leaders can exploit their larger autonomy either to reward followers or to prevent splits. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Party Politics, Political Institutions, European Politics and more broadly to Comparative Politics, Political Theory and Text Analysis.

Social structure may historically have been of primary importance in accounting for the attitudes and behaviour of many citizens, but now changes in social structure have diminished the role played by class and religious affiliation, whilst the significance of personality in political leadership has increased. This volume explores, both theoretically and empirically, the increasingly important role played by the personalisation of leadership. Acknowledging the part played by social cleavages, it focuses on the personal relationships and psychological dimension between citizens and political leaders. It begins by examining the changes which have taken place in the relationship among citizens, the parties which they support and the leaders of these parties in a European context. The authors then assess how far the phenomena of ‘personalised leadership’ differ from country to country, and the forms which these differences take. The book includes comparative case studies on Britain and Northern Ireland, France, Italy, Poland, Japan and Thailand; it concentrates on eleven prominent leaders epitomising personalised political leadership: Thatcher, Blair, Mitterand, Chirac, Le Pen, Berlusconi, Bossi, Walesa, Lepper, Koizumi and Thaksin. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics and political leadership.

This book examines the role played by the parties themselves in two-party systems. It rejects the argument that the behaviour of the parties is determined largely by social forces or by the supposed logic of the electoral market. Instead, it shows that both structure and agency can matter. It focuses on three major aspects of change in two-party systems: (i) why occasionally major parties ( such as the British Liberals) collapse; (ii) why collapsed parties sometimes survive as minor parties, and sometimes do not; and (iii) what determines why, and how, major parties will ally themselves with minor parties in order to maximize their chances of winning. With respect to the first aspect it is argued that major parties are advantaged by two factors: the resources they have accumulated already, and their occupying role similar to that called by Thomas Schelling a "focal arbiter". Consequently, party collapse is rare. When it has occurred in nation states it is the result of a major party having to fight opposition on "two separate fronts". The survival of a collapsed party depends largely on its internal structure; when a party has linked closely the ambitions of politicians at different levels of office, party elimination is more likely. The main arena in which agency is significant - that is, when leadership is possible, including the politician acting as heresthetician - is in the re-building of coalitions. This is necessary for maximizing the chances of a party winning, but, for various reasons, coalitions between major and minor parties are usually difficult to construct. Comparative Politics is a series for scholars and students of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editor is David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.