scholarly journals “I’LL BE BACK…”: The chance of a political comeback as party leader

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 402-422
Author(s):  
Joakim Eidenfalk ◽  
Stuart Woodcock

Political leadership has become increasingly volatile in recent times, as experienced directly by many of the leaders of both major parties in Australia over the last few decades who have been ousted by their own party. While some of these leaders have returned to power, others have faded away into history. Political capital can play a key role in the demise or reclaim of leadership and an immediate response can become critical not only in preventing any further loss of political capital but to begin the re-building of political capital towards a return to a leadership position. This study examined ousted political leaders and the likelihood of a return to leadership. Attribution theory was applied to the first press conference given by six Australian major party leaders immediately after having lost their leadership and were analysed thematically to show what the attributional causes of their successes and failures were during their tenure as party leader. The results indicate that what one says and how one says it can be important for their prospects of returning to the seat of power. The major party leaders who returned to power tended to acknowledge successes due to the collective group, while the other major party leaders tended to attribute the successes to themselves and failures on external factors, including their own collective group. The results illustrate the importance of how one handles one’s downfall in order to climb back up.

Author(s):  
Joanie Bouchard

Abstract Research into the impact of a politician's sociodemographic profile on vote choice in Westminster-style systems has been hindered by the relative sociodemographic homogeneity of party leaders. Past research has focused mainly on the evaluation of local candidates in the American context, but given that elections in plurality systems are far less candidate-oriented , the evaluation of local candidates tells us little about the prevalence of affinity or discrimination in other contexts. This article investigates the effect of political leaders' ethnicity on political behavior by looking at the case of Jagmeet Singh in Canada, the first federal party leader of color in the country's history. While the literature has shown that the gender of leaders in Canada can matter, little is known about the attitudes of Canadians toward party leaders of color specifically. We are interested in the evaluations of Singh and his party, as well as the shifts in voting intentions between elections in 2015 and 2019. We uncover affinity-based behaviors from individuals who identify as Sikh, as well as a negative reception of Singh's candidacy in Quebec.


2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPHINE T. ANDREWS ◽  
ROBERT W JACKMAN

The premise that parties are fundamentally motivated by office-seeking is common, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to its empirical validity. We approach this issue by analysing how parties respond to their electoral performance. Casting party leaders as the embodiment of their parties, we then examine the degree to which the length of time party leaders retain their position hinges on their party's electoral success, defined with reference both to the party's share of legislative seats and to its presence or absence in government. Our analyses centre on six parliamentary democracies in which the government is always formed by one of the two major parties either alone or in coalition with a minor party (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand) in the years from 1945 through 2000. Results indicate that party leaders' risk of removal hinges substantially on their party's seat share and/or their party's presence in government. More specifically, we find that as the seat share of both major and minor parties increases, the chance that the party leader will be removed decreases. Likewise, if a major party loses its role in government, the chance that the party leader will be removed increases dramatically. Although presence in government has no significant impact on the tenure in office of party leaders of minor parties, the magnitude of the effect is indistinguishable from that for major parties. Beyond providing strong evidence that parties are at their core motivated by electoral performance, we also estimate the magnitude of the electoral imperative, at least as it pertains to party leaders.


Author(s):  
Levan Nikoleishvili ◽  
Tamar Kiknadze

The socio-political processes developed in Georgia in the 90s of the twentieth century led to the political transformation of the country. The political changes that began during this period led to the ideological and value transformation of elite structures, including procedural changes in the mechanisms of elite circulation. All this was reflected in the country's domestic and foreign policy.In Georgian reality, the main part of the society is focused on a specific political figure, however, the elite groups united around this leader differ from each other in their values and ideological orientation. At the same time, all post-Soviet political leaders followed different paths of accumulating social and political capital, which became an important component of developing their individual political charisma.The article discusses the features of 4 political leaders of post-Soviet Georgia (Z. Gamsakhurdia, E. Shevardnadze, M. Saakashvili, B. Ivanishvili) and the political processes related to them.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLY JOU ◽  
MASAHISA ENDO

AbstractIn recent years, the impact of party leaders on voting behavior has attracted increasing attention, leading some scholars to identify a phenomenon of ‘presidentialization’. Many extant studies of this topic in Japan are limited to one or two electoral cycles. In order to trace long-term trends, this paper analyses longitudinal survey data to investigate the existence and magnitude of the effect party leader evaluations exert on vote choice in Japan. Empirical results show that while only dominant and forceful personalities substantially influenced voters' likelihood of supporting their parties in the 1980s and 1990s, by the 2000s assessments of most major party leaders had a significant impact on their parties' electoral performance. In short, party leaders affect vote choice due not to their personalities, but instead to the position they hold. We also test the hypotheses that the association between leader appraisal and voting behavior would be particularly conspicuous among voters who lack party identification and those who are most heavily exposed to media reportage. Analysis reveals that (1) independent voters are not more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations than partisans; (2) a leader effect is found more frequently among voters with greater exposure to election coverage on television.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Elisa Carbonaro

Social media is changing the landscape of elections. It opens a new sphere for politicians and political parties to connect with citizens. Now more than ever before we are seeing our political leaders turning to social networking sites in order to campaign and disseminate information, and the Canadian 2015 federal election was a prime example of this. All three major party leaders took to social media as a campaign tactic, but how these leaders make use of social media images has gone relatively unexamined. In this research study I ask what are the common theme(s) evident in all three major party leaders’ Instagram feeds during the 2015 election campaign? And a sub-question derived from this asks: what sorts of latent campaign tactics are suggested by these themes? In order to answer these questions I use a mixed-method approach, both a visual content analysis and discourse analysis are employed using a small sample extrapolated from Instagram. In summation, two major themes are apparent in all three leaders’ Instagram pages: The Crowd Pleaser and The Family Man, both of which have underlining political agendas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Gregor Zons ◽  
Anna Halstenbach

AbstractDespite its right-wing populist character, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) shows no signs of a strong party leadership. We ascribe this state of the party leadership to the AfD’s institutionalization as a new party and show how organizational features interact with the skill set and goals of the party leaders. At the party level, we, firstly, outline the organizational change at the top of the party and the party leader selection rules. Secondly, we depict leadership turnover and competitiveness. At the leader level, we investigate the failure of Bernd Lucke, the key founder and one of the initial party leaders, as a manifestation of the leadership-structure dilemma of new parties. Embedded in a leadership team and faced with a growing extra-parliamentary party structure, Lucke tried to secure his initial autonomy and position of power by an attempt to become the sole party leader. His subsequent exit from the AfD laid bare the fact that he was not able to manage the challenges of the organizational consolidation phase, in which a new party needs a coordinator and consensus-builder. The AfD itself has proven its organizational autonomy from its initial leaders and its distaste for a strong and centralized party leadership. The barriers for the latter remain in place while, at the same time, the party institutionalization is still on-going, especially regarding its place in the German party competition.


Author(s):  
Justin Buchler

This chapter presents a unified model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting, built around a party leadership election. First, a legislative caucus selects a party leader who campaigns based on a platform of a disciplinary system. Once elected, that leader runs the legislative session, in which roll call votes occur. Then elections occur, and incumbents face re-election with the positions they incrementally adopted. When the caucus is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse, and policy motivated, members will elect a leader who solves the collective action problem of sincere voting with “preference-preserving influence.” That leader will threaten to punish legislators who bow to electoral pressure to vote as centrists. Consequently, legislators vote sincerely as extremists and get slightly lower vote shares, but they offset that lost utility with policy gains that they couldn’t have gotten without party influence. Party leaders will rarely pressure legislators to vote insincerely.


Author(s):  
Erik Jentges

The Leadership Capital Index utilizes the conceptual terminology of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This chapter presents the groundwork for the LCI as it clarifies Bourdieu’s key concepts and traces the evolution from political capital to leadership capital. With an overview of Bourdieu’s three core concepts of economic, cultural, and social capital, plus the more elusive symbolic capital, the chapter assists with an appreciation of the analytical potential of the concept of political capital. The notion of leadership capital integrates many (but not all) aspects of Bourdieu’s field-specific notion of political capital and the LCI succeeds in translating his complex conceptualization into a manageable set of ten indicators. The chapter explains how together Bourdieu’s political sociology and the approach suggested through the LCI create numerous synergies and are promising and useful endeavors in the analysis of political leadership.


Author(s):  
N. A. Mozumder

AbstractThis article presents findings from a qualitative study (via in-depth interviews with 121 local political leaders from 65 local authorities in the UK) that aims to understand how ethical leadership practices can restore public trust in political leaders. The study finds that being a moral person, an ethical political leader sets good examples of behaviour, sets the tone at the top and challenges those who do not behave ethically, as well as encourages, supports and rewards those who perform and conduct themselves well. As a result, the level of public trust in political leaders is likely to increase gradually.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Edwards

The objective of this paper is to analyse key elements of the development strategy of Singapore since the mid–1960s. The paper describes the economic challenge faced by Singapore in the mid–1960s, overviews contemporary world trends in foreign direct investment, and uses competitiveness constructs developed by Michael Porter (1985) to clarify key stages in the evolution of Singapore's development strategy. The paper argues that the strategy has been successful because of unremitting top priority given to it by Singapore's political leadership and because the political leaders charged a single organisation, the Economic Development Board (EDB), with absolute authority to develop and implement the strategy. The paper concludes with implications for Queensland's Smart State initiatives.


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