Scale and Durability of Leader Effects

Abstract

Using Britain as a test case, the analysis to this point has confirmed the need to reconceptualize our understanding of modern parliamentary elections to take account of the personalities of the party leaders being substantial influences on their outcomes. Political parties’ growing dependence on television as their campaigning vehicle of preference has obliged them more than in the not-too-recent past to project themselves and shape their popular image through their principal spokesperson, their leader and de facto prime ministerial candidate. By simultaneously encouraging and taking their cues from this more personalized style of campaigning, the print and electronic media in turn have come to lavish more attention on the party leaders and, in so doing, have helped to make them more salient and powerful electoral stimuli for the voting public. The evidence presented in the previous three chapters of this book makes for a persuasive case that British general elections have, in terms of both presentation and impact, become more presidential. To make this argument, however, does not exhaust all there is to be said about this change since it neglects two related, if distinct, facets of the personalization of election campaigns — namely, its scale and durability. That is, not addressed to this point are the questions of, first, how influential the party leaders are relative to each other and to other short-term determinants of the vote and, second, how permanent a change to the dynamics of parliamentary election contests is presidentialism likely to represent.