Party and Leader Effects in Parliamentary Elections: Towards a Reassessment
| Author | Diego Garzia |
| Published date | 01 October 2012 |
| Date | 01 October 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01443.x |
| Subject Matter | Research Article |
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P O L I T I C S : 2 0 1 2 V O L 3 2 ( 3 ) , 1 7 5 – 1 8 5
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01443.x
Research Article
Party and Leader Effects in
Parliamentary Elections: Towards
a Reassessmentponl_1443175..185
Diego Garzia
European University Institute
Social-psychological models of voting behaviour systematically downsize the relevance of party
leader evaluations by conceiving them as mere consequences of causally prior partisan attachments.
However, the validity of this interpretation depends heavily on the effectively exogenous status of
party identification. Empirical research shows that the assumed exogeneity of partisanship is, at best,
doubtful. In such a context, single-equation models of voting are likely to provide seriously biased
estimates. By employing the proper econometric procedures (instrumental variable estimation) and
the most appropriate data sources to address causality issues (panel data) this study provides strong
support in favour of the personalisation hypothesis.
Keywords: electoral behaviour; endogeneity; party identification; personalisation of politics;
research methods
Introduction
In recent decades, political parties have undergone deep transformations that are at
once cause and consequence of the personalisation of politics (Garzia, 2011; McAllis-
ter, 2007) in established parliamentary democracies. The decline of cleavage-based
voting (Franklin, Mackie and Valen, 1992) forced class-mass parties to reshape their
electoral appeal in order to extend the electoral support beyond the segment of
voters to which they usually referred (Mair, Muller and Plasser, 2004). This process
of transformation into catch-all parties implies the declining role of ideology at the
expense of features more appealing to voters, such as the personality of the party
leaders (Farrell and Webb, 2000). Additionally, the growth of television as the
major source of political information for a wide majority of Western electorates has
further reinforced the political weight of individual politicians at the expense of
their own parties (Mughan, 2000).
One of the most crucial consequences of personalisation lies – or at least, should lie
– in the increasing centrality of leaders’ personality in the individual voting calculus.
A widespread interpretation of contemporary voters’ behaviour is that they ‘tend
increasingly to vote for a person and no longer for a party or a platform’ (Manin,
1997, p. 219). Others go even further, contending that ‘election outcomes are now,
more than at any time in the past, determined by voters’ assessments of party leaders’
© 2012 The Author. Politics © 2012 Political Studies Association
176
D I E G O G A R Z I A
(Hayes and McAllister, 1997, p. 3). However, the common wisdom that sees popular
party leaders as a fundamental electoral asset for their own parties has been fiercely
contested by comparative electoral research (Curtice and Holmberg, 2005; Holmberg
and Oscarsson, 2011; Karvonen, 2010; King, 2002). As a common denominator, the
present literature rests on the classic social-psychological framework set forth in The
American Voter, in which short-term influences on voting behaviour are themselves
subject to explanation in terms of temporally and causally prior forces (Campbell
et al., 1960, pp. 24–37; Thomassen, 2005, pp. 7–17). In such a framework, leader
evaluations stand as a sort of residual category, as they appear to be ‘strongly
mediated by such situational factors as the strength as well as the direction of partisan
affiliation’ (Brettschneider and Gabriel, 2002, p. 153).
The enduring validity of such an interpretation of voters’ behaviour rests on the
strong assumption that party identification is relatively fixed and immune from
short-term forces. However, a variety of empirical work has shown that the assumed
exogeneity of partisanship is, at best, doubtful (for a review, see Marks, 1993). Voters
might well like a party leader just because he or she is the leader of the party with
which they identify. Yet the reverse might be true as well – voters could declare
themselves partisans simply because of the appeal of the party’s leader (Curtice and
Holmberg, 2005, p. 239; Garzia, 2013). If the latter was the case, then trying to
estimate the magnitude of leadership effects by controlling for party identification
‘would understate the final impact of leaders’ images by misattributing to party
identification ... a portion of leadership’s direct effects’ (Dinas, 2008, p. 508).
In this article, I take up the task of reassessing the magnitude of leader effects in
parliamentary elections. I do so by employing the necessary econometric proce-
dures (i.e., instrumental variable estimation) to overcome the problem of reciprocal
causation between voters’ feelings of partisanship and their evaluation of party
leaders. The following section reviews the relevant literature on leader effects and
highlights its main weaknesses from a methodological point of view. Next, empirical
measures are presented. The statistical analysis is performed using the data source
that is best suited to address causality issues: panel data. For illustrative purposes,
the analysis is performed on timely national election study data from three estab-
lished parliamentary democracies in Western Europe: Britain, Germany and Italy.
The results are discussed in the concluding section, along with their foremost
implications for the study of leader effects in democratic elections.
Party identification and leader evaluations:
an endogenous relationship
In the classic Michigan model, vote choices are conceived as a function of ‘the
cumulative consequences of temporally ordered sets of factors’ (Miller and Shanks,
1996, p. 192). At the heart of this model lies the notion of party identification – a
long-term affective orientation to a political party, which is rooted in early sociali-
sation and based on an objective location in the social structure (Campbell et al.,
1960). Due to its social-psychological nature, party identification is conceived as an
unmoved mover: that is, a pre-political attitude that is nonetheless able to shape the
individual’s political world-view in a way that accords with their partisan orientation
(Johnston, 2006). On these bases, partisanship is thought to be a cause (but not
consequence) of less stable attitudes and opinions about issues and candidates.
© 2012 The Author. Politics © 2012 Political Studies Association
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The exogenous status of party identification, however, is far from being uncon-
tested (Holmberg, 2007). In...
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