Party Leaders and their Selection Rules in Western Europe

Bruno Marino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367695453
• eBook ISBN: 9781000436563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the determinants behind the openings in party leader selection rules (leaders' selectorate) in 10 Western European countries and more than 55 parties between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s.

Presenting a novel and revealing theoretical and empirical framework, it tackles the impact of party change and the personalisation of politics, specifically using data coming from the first expert survey on the personalisation of politics in Western Europe; the PoPES. A quantitative analysis is paired with more in-depth explorations of two Italian parties (the Italian Communist Party - Democratic Party of the Left; the Northern League) and the (missed) opening of their leader selectorate. This book highlights the critical importance of studying party leader selection rules against the backdrop of allegedly declining parties and rising party leaders and concludes by placing its findings in a broader discussion about the future of Western European party leaders.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party systems, leadership, political elites, elections, democracy, and more widely of Western European politics and comparative politics.

1Leaders and parties in Western Europe

Why write a book on party leaders and their selection rules? The answer is simple: in recent times, the centrality of (political) leadership has been magnified by several transformations that occurred in Western Europe.

Indeed, Western European societies and political spheres have been profoundly modified by processes such as the increasing individualisation of society, the emergence and consolidation of ‘post-materialist’ values, the increasing pervasiveness of media in societal and political matters (Inglehart 1977, Flinders 2012, pp. 1–36, Bardi et al. 2014, p. 243, Tormey 2015, pp. 59–82). Paired to such changes, a growing interest has flourished around ‘personality politics’ (Costa Lobo and Curtice 2015), i.e., the growing importance of single persons at the expense of the structures they might lead or to which they might be connected (Karvonen 2010, p. 4; Balmas et al. 2014, p. 37).

In this book, I address a specific aspect of the growing importance of ‘personalities’: the determinants behind the openings of party leader selection rules in Western Europe between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, understanding why it is relevant to study party leaders (Section 1.1) and their selection rules (Section 1.2). Then, Section 1.3 briefly discusses the existing studies analysing the opening of party leader selection rules, while Section 1.4 introduces the two areas of research at the centre of this research: the party change framework and the personalisation of politics.

1.1 Party decline and the rise of party leaders

The centrality of party leaders is even more important if analysed vis-à-vis the decline of political parties, as already argued, albeit from a partly different perspective, by Pakulski and Körösényi (2012, pp. 51–65) and Pilet and Cross (2015, pp. 2–4). Here, I deal with just a handful of aspects of the (real or alleged) party decline, and then I turn my attention to party leaders.

First, a critical reader might note that parties have not been experiencing a real decline. Indeed, given the overlap between party decline and mass party decline (Ignazi 2017, pp. 123–125), when there is a discussion about party decline, we should talk about a mass party decline, especially in terms of party membership and party responsiveness.

Indeed, Western European political parties have been losing members for several decades¹ but this constitutes a sign of party decline only if we assume that mass parties are the ‘reference point’ for political organisations nowadays. Indeed, a large membership is a feature of mass political parties, which have (had) a ‘thicker’ organisational extent (Gunther and Diamond 2003, p. 173). Party membership is undoubtedly a central area of research for party scholars even today (Kölln 2014, 2016, Van Haute et al. 2018), but our critical reader would say it is not the party that is dying, but only the mass party (Tormey 2015, p. 90).

Also, a second aspect of party decline, the shrinking party responsiveness, shall be put into perspective. Mair (2009, 2013) argued that, for political parties, it has been increasingly difficult to take into consideration members’, voters’, or even citizens’ preferences, given the increasing distancing between society and parties (Katz and Mair 1995, 2018, pp. 124–150). Nonetheless, the sceptical reader might argue that this responsiveness crisis is nothing to be worried about. If (some) parties are becoming less responsive, then citizens, as ‘absolute sovereign’ in general elections (Manin 1997, pp. 135–138), might take this element into account when casting the vote (see also Pakulski and Körösényi 2012, pp. 98–103).

Indeed, there are accounts linking the electoral performance of incumbent Western European parties during the Great Recession and detrimental economic conditions (Hernández and Kriesi 2016): parties that have been less ‘responsive’ towards citizens in such a dire moment have been allegedly punished in the ballot boxes. Moreover, maybe we are just witnessing a new phase in the historical evolution of political parties, especially concerning responsiveness and responsibility (Bardi et al. 2014, pp. 237–243).² As argued by Rahat and Kenig (2018, pp. 20), who summarise the position by Dalton et al. (2011),

what is important is that political parties continue to provide a meaningful policy linkage […] it still matters which party or parties are in office […] parties have certainly changed but this does not mean that they are necessarily weaker.

Nonetheless, this is a very optimistic account. There are two further elements of party decline to consider: the decreasing autonomy of party government and the declining legitimacy of political parties.

The former – well-known – issue is related to several crucial aspects of democratic politics, like the increasing supranational constraints imposed by EU institutions on Eurozone countries (Laffan 2014, Rose 2014). More generally, parties have experienced a declining grip over the set of policies to choose from and over the specific policies to be implemented, because of external constraints, and this is a crucial point to understand the decline of party government (Mair 2013).

The latter phenomenon, the low level of parties’ legitimacy, is more interesting for this book. Dealing with declining and dying roots with the society around them, showing less responsiveness towards (sectors of) the society, and being increasingly unable to properly structure an autonomous party government, political parties are also, maybe not surprisingly, not so much legitimate in the eyes of citizens, as shown by (Western) European citizen’s levels of trust in parties (Ignazi 2017, pp. 168–171).

These are severe signs of decline, even assuming that contemporary political parties are less strong and have fewer roots within society than mass parties. Indeed, parties always need certain links with society. Following Sartori (1976, pp. 64; (italics in original)), ‘[a] party is any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office’. So, certain connections between a party and its environment are needed, for instance, because ‘[t]he candidates […] need to make themselves known. And there is every reason to suppose that the cost of such an undertaking is not negligible’ (Manin 1997, pp. 143 (italics in original)). Here, the point is not about the costs of electoral campaigns. Even a cadre party, a catch-all party (Kirchheimer 1969), a professional-electoral party (Panebianco 1988), or a cartel party (Katz and Mair 1995) need basic connections with society to have more chances, in Sartori’s words, of putting up candidates. So, if most politicians and candidates need a party, even in an era of personalisation of politics (Rahat and Kenig 2018, pp. 228–229), in turn, contemporary political parties need a minimum level of connection with society.

Therefore, if parties have less room for manoeuvre in government (or in parliament), are seen by few citizens as trustworthy actors, and have fewer roots within society, they might be at risk. (Most) parties might be regarded by ever-increasing parts of society as inefficient or useless actors (Mair 2013). Incidentally, this widening hiatus between (mainstream) parties and the society around them has been connected, in different fashions, to the rise of populist parties in the past few years (Kriesi and Pappas 2015, pp. 1–4).

If a specific structure is declining – the party in Western Europe – there is someone at the intra-party level who has, at the same time, particular prominence: the party leader. Clearly, the presence of central figures within political parties is not a new phenomenon (Michels 1915 [2001], Duverger 1964, pp. 151–182).³ Nonetheless, there is a new element that marks a clear d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Two takes, two stories
• 1 Leaders and parties in Western Europe
• 2 Setting the ground: The opening of party leader selection rules
• 3 The internal and external factors
• 4 Explaining openings in party leader selection rules
• 5 The PCI-PDS: The strength of ideology
• 6 The Northern League: The consequences of intra-party divisions
• Conclusions: Party leaders, representation, and power
• Index