Explaining Leader Effects

Abstract

The cumulative evidence presented in the previous chapter demonstrated that British general elections have not presidentialized in the sense of the Conservative and Labour party leaders coming to enjoy a stronger electoral impact with each passing election. Rather, leader effects inched upwards in fits and starts between 1964 and 1983, jumped sharply in 1987 — the first election in which both major parties fully embraced leader-centred campaigning strategies — fell back, although not to the 1983 level, in 1992 and then moved a little upwards again in 1997. The absence of a secular trend notwithstanding, election contests were concluded to have presidentialized in the more limited sense of having become more leader-centred after 1983 in terms of both presentation and impact than their post-war predecessors. Presidential change there has been, then, and the logical next question is: how do we account for the actual pattern of leader effects that has transpired? The problem with a question of this type, of course, is that it is difficult to provide a simple answer to it since complex change is, by its nature, unlikely to be susceptible to univariate explanation.