Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

Abstract

Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties’ perceived unity as well as competence in the policy‐making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties’ performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties’ record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties’ electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties’ electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests’ timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes.

Are Citizens More Politically Engaged when Candidate Selection is Democratic? Analysis of Seven Parliamentary Election Cycles in Israel (1996–2015)

“…For candidate selection, there is thus a clear conceptual and temporal link with electoral participation and partisan participation. As other intra-party procedures such as leadership selections usually take place more than a year before the elections (So 2021), we argue that candidate selection provides a stricter test of the link between intraparty democratization and both participation and engagement.…”

“…Even if the two forms of intra-party personnel selection are often discussed together (e.g., Sandri et al 2015), there are crucial differences between leadership selection and candidate selection which may lead to different empirical outcomes as to the electoral effects of inclusive selection procedures. Typically, there is a substantial time lag 2 between leadership selection processes and subsequent elections as party elites fear to foster a perception of disunity shortly prior to the election (So 2021). This time lag might also explain why Pedersen and Schumacher (2015) and Cozza and Somer-Topcu (2021) only find a short-term boost in the parties' polling results and no long-term electoral effect: by the time the election takes place, voters' initial enthusiasm about the democratic nature of leadership selections has already waned off.…”

“…2. So (2021) finds that the median timing of leadership contests is 15 months before an election. 3.…”

A multi-stage and multi-actor perspective on intra-party competition: Introduction to the symposium

“…The most well-known example of trying to achieve power and status in central office is to participate in party leadership contests. These contests typically take place during the post-electoral stage, temporally well-removed from the elections and parliamentary nomination processes (So, 2021). As regards intra-party competition in the party on the ground, co-partisans who do not hold public office but may want to improve their status within the party could gain membership in civil society organisations (Arter, 2013) or attain local political office (Put and Maddens, 2015) in-between elections.…”

Fame and factions: A process-tracing analysis of the 2019 leadership selection process in the Belgian French-speaking liberal party (MR)

“…Who leads a party has important political consequences (Pilet and Cross, 2014;So, 2021). Furthermore, the role of party leaders has expanded in the last decades (Passarelli, 2015).…”