ABSTRACT
As set out in the introduction to this volume, our goal has been to shed a new light on a major element of contemporary democratic practice: the selection of political party leaders. Who the leaders are, how they are chosen and how they are held to account are key questions in understanding the distribution of political power both within parties and in the broader democratic setting. Party leaders in most political systems are key actors in the functioning of their democracies: they lead their parties both between elections and during electoral campaigns. In doing so, they supervise, and sometimes directly control, the selection of candidates who represent their party in legislative elections; they often lead their party’s legislative caucus; they play a key role in drafting party manifestos; and, when in government, they are central in the selection of party ministers and in negotiations among parties when coalitions are formed. Moreover, in most political systems, the leaders of major parties are the main contenders for the position of prime minister. Given these key functions, it is not surprising that several scholars have recently observed that the position of party leader has become more powerful over the past 20 years. The observation is that leaders have become more influential in both intra-party and governmental decisionmaking, and more central in the minds of voters when deciding who to vote for (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Aarts et al. 2011; Dowding 2013). Yet, surprisingly enough, the role of party leaders has not been the source of much academic attention. Compared to research on ministers, on members of parliament, or even on candidates, the literature on party leaders remains limited in both quantity and scope (Cross and Blais 2012a). Most studies are of individual cases, or are limited comparative studies of two or three cases. Publications covering more countries are the exception (see Marsh 1993; Davis 1998; Cross and Blais 2012a, 2012b). Moreover, many tend to concentrate on single aspects of party leadership, either on the personal history of one leader, or on one case of leadership selection that has attracted considerable political attention or is thought to have significant consequences. In this volume, our aim has been to advance the study of party leadership by presenting an ambitious examination of leadership selection in 13 countries from western and eastern Europe, Oceania and North America covering the period between 1965 and 2012. The 13 countries are all parliamentary democracies. We
exclude presidential systems as the role of party leader is not as clear and certainly differs from that found in parliamentary democracies. In presidential systems, the crucial moment is not so much the selection of a party leader, but rather the selection of the candidate for the next presidential election – and these two positions are often distinct. This is evident in the example of France in 2012, when neither of the two leading presidential candidates François Hollande nor Nicolas Sarkozy was the formal leader of their party. Similarly, Mitt Romney cannot be said to lead the US Republican Party in 2013 even though he was its most recent presidential candidate. This can be contrasted with, for example, Tony Abbott’s continued leadership of the Australian Labor Party after his 2010 electoral defeat. Because of these very different dynamics relating to party leadership, we have limited our analysis to parliamentary systems. Within this group, the cases selected differ on several important variables. First, we have both majoritarian and proportional systems. And, among the ten cases where elections are held under proportional representation, we include some where the party system is clearly bipolarised (such as Spain, Portugal, Hungary and to some extent Germany, Norway and Romania), and others where the party system is more fragmented and where coalitions are flexible (such as Belgium, Austria and Israel). In addition, our study includes countries with different democratic histories. Some are older democracies like Britain, Canada, Australia, Belgium and Norway; others are post-Second World War democracies such as Germany, Austria and Italy; while others experienced democratic transitions more recently – Spain and Portugal in the 1970s and Romania and Hungary in the 1990s. For the older democracies, our study generally begins in 1965, and for the newer ones we start in the year of their first democratic elections. Finally, we have centralised political systems as well as multi-level systems, a characteristic that may have direct consequences on the career paths of politicians, including party leaders (Borchert and Stolz 2011; Detterbeck 2012). These differences among our cases have implications for the study of party leadership, as is made evident in the chapters in this volume. In this concluding chapter, we present a comparative analysis of political party leadership in these 13 countries. Within these countries, we have a total of 71 political parties included in our study as of 2012 – and this does not include older parties that may have disappeared but are also covered in the earlier analysis (such as the Canadian Reform Party, the British SDP and the several Italian parties of the First Republic). For most countries, the five most relevant parties are studied – usually meaning the largest ones. Following Sartori’s definition of relevant parties (Sartori 1976), those that have some blackmail potential in the making of governing coalitions are also included. For some countries, like Belgium, Norway, Italy and Spain, five parties are not enough and a few more are added. In addition, in a few chapters, authors have added parties that were neither large, nor relevant for the making of government but that were innovative when it comes to the selection of party leaders. This was the case, for example, of the Australian Democrats who were the sole Australian party to have used membership
voting for the selection of their leaders. For similar reasons, the Hungarian LMP (Politics Can Be Different) is also included. Overall, with 13 countries and over 70 political parties, we have more data on party leadership than any previous study. To provide some sense of the quantity of data collected, we note that this volume surveys close to 900 leadership contests and more than 400 party leaders. This vast amount of data is used in this concluding chapter for a first comprehensive, comparative exploration of party leadership in parliamentary democracies. The analysis follows the same structure as the country chapters. We start with a discussion regarding the identification of who the leaders are in the different political parties. We then discuss the rules that are used to select party leaders, with an emphasis on the selectorate and on the trend towards its becoming more inclusive. In the third section, we study the dynamics of leadership races, focusing on their degree of competitiveness. And, finally, in a fourth section, we detail the demographic characteristics of party leaders in terms of gender, age, political experience and length of tenure, and we examine how these evolve over time and vary according to the rules used for selecting leaders.
