Party Leadership Change: A New Measure and Application

• In Event: Structure and Leadership of Political Parties

Abstract

Our study analyses the relationship between leadership change and different aspects of party change. Existing studies on party leaders have largely focused on their selection, individual traits, leadership survival, and electoral impact, or highlighted the increasing dominance of leaders. However, even though leadership change may signal shifts in policy, organisation, and party personnel or bring about a broader renovation or reimagining of the party, only limited attention has been paid to the relationship between leadership change and change in political parties. Thereby, party leadership change takes various forms and leadership novelty ranges from the appointment of heirs apparent to political newcomers rising to positions of leadership. We have devised a quasi-quantitative scale of leadership novelty that distinguishes between more significant forms of leadership change (outsiders taking over) and more trivial forms (insiders replacing incumbents). Furthermore, the de facto leaders of parties can occupy different formal positions – such as party chairs, prime ministers, or prime ministerial candidates – that often but not always coincide. Our measure of leadership novelty considers these various positions of importance as well.

We then empirically test the relationship between leadership novelty/change and other aspects of party change – turnover among candidates, policy change, and organizational change (fission and fusion of parties or electoral coalitions). Our study is based on the ‘Electoral Candidates in Central and Eastern Europe’ (ECCEE) database of 78 elections in nine Central and East European (CEE) countries. The ECCEE dataset contains information on all electoral candidates and data on organizational change and leadership for all parties with at least 10% of the vote (over 200 parties); for policy change, we rely on existing datasets (MARPOR and Chapel Hill Expert Survey). CEE offers a perfect testing ground for questions about party change because of the abundance of party change and new (or partially new) parties across the region. We find evidence of a relationship between the scale of leadership change and candidate turnover and policy change. However, only substantial leadership novelty is associated with significant changes on other dimensions; deputy leaders and heirs apparent taking over as party leaders do not affect candidate or policy change to the same extent. Regarding organizational change – i.e., fission and fusion of parties or electoral coalitions – we discover that higher candidate overlap (‘congruence’) between the parent party (or a merged party) and a successor (or a predecessor) nearly always corresponds to higher levels of leadership congruence between them.

Authors

• Philipp Koeker, Leibniz University Hannover

• Matthew E K Schlachter, University College London