15:00 - 16:40
PS4
Room: Meeting Room 1.1
Panel Session 4
Toni Rodon - "United we win, divided we lose". The Electoral Impact of Candidate Selection
Klara Dentler - Electoral Messiah or Party Label? Quantifying and Identifying Leader-Party Relationships and Causal Pathways in German Federal Elections
Vicente Valentim - Observational Evidence of Normative Influences on Political Preferences
David Andersen - Crowded out: The effects of concurrent elections on voter learning and behavior
Electoral Messiah or Party Label? Quantifying and Identifying Leader-Party Relationships and Causal Pathways in German Federal Elections
PS4-02
Presented by: Klara Dentler
Klara Dentler, Katharina Blinzler, Stephen Quinlan
GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Personalization in parliamentary systems has supposedly been growing over the past 50-years. Whether institutional rules privileging individuals over the party, increasing media coverage of candidates/party leaders, swelling leader power within parties, or election campaigns centered on party leaders, personalization is en-vogue. While the personalization thesis has assumed conventional wisdom status, the distinct impact of party leaders on vote choice (i.e., behavioral personalization) remains the subject of debate. The empirical evidence concerning the extent and circumstances when leader inclined voting, independent of party popularity, takes root, is decidedly mixed. Attempts to disentangle the distinct pathways between the two motivations have been few and far between, primarily hampered by a lack of relevant panel data. Here we leverage the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), which includes repeated measures of respondents over time and captures respondents' attitudes towards party and leader at separate intervals, allowing us to tease out their separate impacts. Germany is a valuable case to explore vote/leader dynamics given the media's significant focus on the race for Chancellor. While exploring leader-party dynamics in elections between 1998-2021 inclusive, we concentrate primarily on the 2021 Federal election, notable for the late surge of the SPD, supposedly credited to the performance of its Chancellor Candidate Olaf Scholz. Our goal is to offer a more nuanced and definitive estimation of the decisive impact of party leaders on vote choice independent of their party. Our analysis illuminates the literature on behavioral personalization and contributes to comprehending the role of leadership in the 2021 German election.