Hard Acts to Follow: Predecessor Effects on Party Leader Survival.

Yusaku Horiuchi, Matthew Laing, Paul 't Hart

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

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’.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)357–366
Number of pages10
JournalParty Politics
Volume21
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Keywords

  • Parliamentary democracies
  • party leaders
  • leadership succession
  • prime ministers
  • survival analysis

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