ABSTRACT
Political leaders make defining contributions to political parties. As well as leading parties, individuals sometimes form new parties. Leaders are considered an asset or a liability when parties compete with other parties. In spite of their importance leaders are frequently pushed into the background in the literature on party system change. The emphasis tends to be on the sociological forces that parties are supposed to represent or the institutional rules which are said to shape patterns of competition between parties. The omission of leaders may be the consequence of the methods used to study party systems. Comparative studies that manipulate large amounts of quantitative data are common but they are limited by the availability of numerical data that can be used to represent explanatory variables (Lane and Ersson 1994: 97-8).1 It is difficult to see how the quality of leadership could be assigned meaningful numerical values and analysed using a large-n comparison.2
