Journal Articles

Hard acts to follow Predecessor effects on party leader survival

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In this article, using our original data on party leadership succession in 23 parliamentary democracies, we investigate the determinants of a party leader’s survival rate: how long he/she remains in office. Unlike previous studies, which focus on institutional settings of leadership selection or on situational (political, economic and international) conditions at the time of succession, we propose a perceptual theory of leadership survival, focusing on the expectations of party constituents (or indirectly, the voting public) who have the power to remove a leader. Specifically, we argue that they ‘benchmark’ their expectation of a current party leader’s performance by comparing it against their memory of that leader’s immediate predecessor. Empirically, we show that party leaders who succeeded a (very) long-serving party leader and/or a leader who had also been the head of government experience lower longevity than others, making these types of predecessor ‘hard acts to follow’.

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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

1354-0688

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 21, Number 3 May 2015, pages 357-366

Subject(s)

party leaders
Parliamentary democracies
Prime ministers

Specific Detail Info

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