Tales of the unexpected: The selection of British party leaders since 1963

Abstract

Jeremy Corbyn's election as Leader of the Labour Party in 2015 stunned observers and practitioners of British politics alike. In this article, we first outline a theoretical framework that purports to explain why political parties operating in parliamentary systems choose the leaders they do. We then examine 32 leadership successions involving five major British parties since 1963, and note that many of these were unexpected, in that they were triggered by unforeseen circumstances, such as the sudden death or resignation of the incumbent.Examining each party in turn, we briefly explain why the winners won and identify at least eight cases (a quarter of our sample) where a candidate widely expected to prevail at the outset was ultimately defeated by a 'dark horse', 'second favourite' or even 'rank outsider'. Of these, Corbyn's election in 2015 was the most unexpected and, consistent with the findings of studies of party leadership conventions in other parliamentary systems, namely Canada and Spain, suggests that ideological and policy concerns are sometimes more important than considerations of party unity and electability, especially when a leadership contest is dominated by party activists.

The Labour Party leadership election: The Stark model and the selection of Keir Starmer

“…This applied to the Labour Party leadership elections of 1980, 1983 and 2010—see Table 3 . In these leadership elections, Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and David Miliband were stronger candidates in terms electability and perceived competence (as compared to Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband), but they were defeated because their opponents were deemed to be superior in the first-order criteria of unity-acceptability (see Stark 1996 ; Quinn 2012 ; Denham and Dorey 2018 ).…”

“…Within the academic literature on leadership selection within the Labour Party, the model advanced by Leonard Stark ( 1996 ), focussing on candidate acceptability, electability and competence, has repeatedly been cited in terms of explaining who won and why (see for example, Heppell 2010a ; b ; Heppell et al 2010 ; Heppell and Crines 2011 ; Dorey and Denham 2011 , 2016 ; Quinn 2012 , 2016 ; Denham and Dorey 2018 ; Denham et al 2020 ). The utility and objectivity of the Stark model has been questioned, however, in a recent paper in British Politics by Maiguashca and Dean ( 2020 ) as part of their wider critique about the biases inherent within political science research on British politics (see also Allen 2020 ; Allen and Moon 2020 ).…”

Party Leadership Selection in the United Kingdom

“…As argued in the introduction, we will discuss three parties: the Liberal Democrats (and its predecessors), the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. From 1965From until 1975, all the main British parties (the then-existing Liberal Party and the Conservatives and the Labour Party) selected the party leader via their Members of Parliament (Bale and Webb 2014;Denham and Dorey 2017). This is not surprising given the powerful role that the Parliament has had in Britain's national history.…”

“…Some scholars hypothesised a link between the low-profile performance of Corbyn in Scotland and London and the results of the Brexit referendum. For instance, Dorey and Denham (2017) argue, «It is, perhaps, significant that both London and Scotland were also strong supporters of Remain in the recent EU referendum, and this might have curbed some support for Corbyn in these two areas». At first glance, this interpretation seems plausible.…”

“…More information on past leadership selection races in the most important British parties can be found inDenham and Dorey (2017) and in the online appendices of the book edited byPilet and Cross (2014), which can be downloaded from the following website: https://www.routledge.com/The-Selection-of-Political-Party-Leaders-in-Contemporary-Parliamentary/Pilet-Cross/p/book/9780415704168.…”