The Leadership Dilemma: Examining the Impact of 'strong' Leaders on Parties

Party leaders are regarded as crucial to a party’s success. The right leader can offer advantages that seem to tip the electoral scales. The leader who is regarded as prime ministerial can deliver support to the party that others cannot. As a result parties wish to choose a leader who can dominate the party. This paper asks whether that dominance comes with a price, and we seek to find if strong leaders damage their parties in the longer term. We argue that dominant leaders might also damage their parties.This will happen because the good times that parties experience under strong leaders lead the parties to make strategic errors for which the parties pay at the end of the leaders’ tenure or after their departure. There are two plausible, but not exclusive sets of mechanisms. The first relates to over investment in the leader’s image, so that the leader acts as a ‘Foil’ for their successors, whereby the successors appear weak, or generally underwhelming in comparison to the prior leader. The second set is a ‘Damage’ theory, that the strong leader actively (if not deliberately) damages the party. We find initial support for our argument. After the departure of strong leaders, parties on average lose 2.7 percent of the national vote in subsequent elections. This effect is most likely independent of whether the party was in office or in opposition.