17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Janina Beiser-McGrath
Discussant/s:
Torun Dewan
Meeting Room F

Christine Sylvester, Julia Maynard
The Spurious Relationship between Party Leader Resignations and their Votes

Janina Beiser-McGrath, Anja Osei
Can I stay or must I go? Cabinet replacement in Africa

Despina Alexiadou
Cabinet reshuffles: how bad are they for expertise and policy?

Ebru Ece Özbey
Populist Contagion in the House of Commons: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Blair to May

Maria Thürk, Heike Klüver
The electoral implications of minority cabinets
The Spurious Relationship between Party Leader Resignations and their Votes
Christine Sylvester 1, Julia Maynard 2, 3
1 University of Strathclyde
2 University of Michigan
3 University of Zurich

In the literature, party leadership changes have been treated as a binary measure. The classic story is a party leader steps down following poor electoral performance as a means to realign the party with voters. We challenge this assumption that party leadership is binary and argue that it is not always preceded by electoral loss. For instance, Olof Palme, the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, was assassinated in 1986, which could not have been predicted by the 1985 election. On the other hand, Ed Miliband, leader of the UK Labour Party, resigned shortly after the 2015 election as a result of Labour’s poor performance. In the case of Palme, there is no apparent link between the previous election and his end of leadership whereas in the case of Miliband, there is a strong link. We look at the relationship between electoral loss and party leadership change by using a novel dataset of leadership changes in advanced industrial democracies from 1960-2020. We find that electoral loss should only precede leadership resignations for reasons of electoral loss or intra-party factionalization, not for natural transitions, such as health reasons or caretakers. We conclude that leadership change is indeed not a binary concept- it is multifaceted and has a spurious relationship with previous electoral loss.