13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Discussant/s:
Tarik Abou-Chadi
Meeting Room N

Zeynep Somer-Topcu, Oguzhan Alkan
Party Leader Characteristics and Voters’ Perceptions of Party Ideological Positions

Martin Elff
Valence or Position? Both! A Unified Conception of Party Competition and Its Implications for the Reconstruction of Parties' Political Profiles

Jan Schwalbach
Same same but different? The Context Dependency of Party Perception
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Party Leader Characteristics and Voters’ Perceptions of Party Ideological Positions
Zeynep Somer-Topcu 1, Oguzhan Alkan 2
1 University of Texas at Austin
2 University of Texas at Austin

How do party leadership changes affect voters’ perceptions of party positions? In a recent paper, Fernandez-Vazquez and Somer-Topcu (2019) showed that voters more accurately perceive party campaign positions following a leadership change. Yet, not all leadership changes are the same. We argue that voters expect policy change following a leadership change and modify their perceptions of party positions particularly if the new leader is from a different generation than the previous leader, of another gender, or if elected following a competitive leadership election. Using original leadership data and the CSES survey data from 11 advanced democracies, we test how voters react to different leadership changes.

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