Book Review: Comparative Politics: Prime Ministers in Power: Political Leadership in Britain and Australia
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12016_57 |
| Author | Nicholas Allen |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
whereas the remainder of the volume is devoted to the
main contextual variables that are thought to enhance/
constrain leader effects. Curtice and Hunjan show that
majoritarian electoral systems do favour leader effects
vis-à-vis PR systems. With respect to party size, Aardal
and Binder demonstrate that leader effects are stronger
for bigger parties.What does not seem to matter indeed
are micro-level characteristics (e.g.age, gender) of both
voters and leaders, as highlighted in Nadeau and Nev-
itte’s and Gidengil’s chapters.The final chapters tur n to
empirical democratic theory, reaching substantially
reassuring conclusions. Aarts and Blais find that positive
evaluations matter more than negative ones. Similarly,
Ohr and Oscarsson demonstrate that voters’ evaluation
of leaders is for the most part driven by politically
relevant, performance-related traits such as perceived
competence and integrity – an electoral asset in every
political context taken into account by the authors.
The electoral effect of leaders’ traits is indeed at the
core of Amanda Bittner’s Platform or Personality,an
especially welcome contribution to the slowly emerg-
ing comparative literature on the topic. Bittner’s thor-
ough empirical analyses, based on an astounding
collection of national election studies from sixteen dif-
ferent democracies, challenge from the outset the con-
solidated paradigm that sees candidate-centred voting as
a mere short cut for the less informed, unsophisticated
segment of voters. Among the many merits of this
book the author’s willingness to go beyond thermom-
eter measurements of party leader popularity (as in
various chapters in Aarts et al.) must be highlighted,
opting instead for a more informed understanding of
leader evaluations based on perceived personality traits.
The difficulties in terms of cross-national comparability
inherent in this strategy are settled through an unprec-
edented detailed investigation of the dimensional
structure of traits. The results link well with existing
research on the topic,and confir m that voters’ appraisal
of leaders’ personality is based on a limited number
of politically relevant traits, namely, character and
competence.
The book also elaborates on the role of partisan
stereotypes in driving voters’ evaluation of the personal
characteristics of party leaders. As it turns out, voters
perceive conservative leaders to have a particular
strength on the competence dimension, whereas
centre-left leaders are seen to have more character. In
the crucial chapter of her book (ch. 6) Bittner moves
traits evaluations to the right-hand side of the equation
in order to assess the actual impact of perceived leader
characteristics on election outcomes. Unfortunately,
this analysis is restricted to a relatively well-studied case
in the literature, namely the US, and so the results do
not seem to add much to available knowledge. Never-
theless, the chapter remains valuable for pointing out
the crucial distinction between ‘maximal’ and ‘real’
effect, with the former demonstrating ‘the incredible
impact leaders could have’ and the latter reminding us
that ‘leaders’ traits can and do still have a discernible
impact on the distribution of votes in the real world’(p.
114). This chapter also takes into account the role
played by the political sophistication of voters them-
selves. It appears that leader evaluations are even more
important for highly sophisticated voters. Leaders’ per-
sonality assessments help voters to choose wisely.
These volumes represent a substantial step forward in
our understanding of the role of political leaders in
democratic elections. A remarkable combination of
empirical evidence and normative insights makes both
Political Leaders and Democratic Elections and Platform or
Personality a must read for scholars interested in the
changing dynamics of voting behaviour in contempo-
rary democracies.
Diego Garzia
(European University Institute)
Prime Ministers in Power: Political Leadership in
Britain and Australia by Mark Bennister. Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 240pp., £55.00, ISBN
978 0230273214
Prime Ministers in Power is a detailed comparative study
of John Howard, Australia’s Liberal-National Prime
Minister between 1996 and 2007, andTony Blair, Brit-
ain’s Labour Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007.
Although ideologically and geographically from differ-
ent hemispheres, Blair and Howard both operated in
largely majoritarian systems, they both held office for a
decade or so, they both faced favourable economic
conditions, they both actively supported the US-led
‘war on terror’ and they both stretched the institutional
capacity of their office.The similar ities and differences
in their styles reveal much about the difficulties of
contemporary political leadership.
The book employs the ‘prime ministerial predomi-
nance’ model (associated with Richard Heffernan) as its
BOOK REVIEWS 261
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)
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