Switching Horses: Party Performance and Leadership Survival
P12-S302-2
Presented by: Federico Acarregui, Javier Martinez Canto
Party leaders wield considerable influence as some of the most powerful political figures within parliamentary democracies. In pursuit of the party’s objectives, they possess significant powers related to the day-to-day management of the party organization, formulation of policy preferences, and selection of candidates for public office. Simultaneously, parties hold leaders accountable for their actions, replacing them when their performance endangers the party’s electoral opportunities. Previous studies on the factors influencing party leaders' survival primarily focused on stable institutional mechanisms that govern the relationship between the party leader and the party's decision-makers or the leader's electoral performance. However, party insiders often rely on other cues to assess a leader's potential success. We propose that opinion polls are one of those indicators. Specifically, we test that party leaders are likelier to exit office prematurely when their party's performance in public opinion polls is poor. Moreover, we anticipate that intra-party institutions and intra-party divisions to moderate the role of polls. Empirically, we employ survival analysis to test the effect of opinion polling on party leaders’ survival in a sample of over 269 party leaders from 47 political parties in 9 parliamentary democracies since 1950. Our results confirm that better results in pre-electoral polls increase the chances of leadership survival.
Keywords: Intra-party politics, Party leaders, Polls, Survival analysis