Journal Articles

Parties, conditionality and leader effects in parliamentary elections

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Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electorally relevant party attachments in democratic electorates, this article demonstrates that parliamentary party leaders have their strongest impact not when, as is usually the case, they are conceptualized as electoral forces in their own right, but when evaluations of them as individuals are moderated by voters’ matching evaluations of the parties contesting the election. Comparing (aligned) Australia and (dealigned) Britain, it is shown that election-time party evaluations condition the magnitude of leader effects independently of the strength of party identification in the electorate.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Party Politics

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oaks : Sage Publications., 2015

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13540688

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 21, Number 1 January 2015, pages 28-39

Subject(s)

Individual vs. comparative evaluations
Leader evaluations
Models of leader effects
Partisan dealignment

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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