Candidates and Voting Behavior

Abstract

The relative importance of the party leader has long been one of the prime questions in the study of elections. After much debate about whether leaders matter greatly or not at all, research in the past years has shifted to the question of under which conditions candidates matter. This has opened up the field to a wide range of conditional explanations, on the contextual level with electoral system, party system or country characteristics, on the leadership level with the behavior and characteristics of political leaders, and at the individual level of the voter. This panel invites papers investigating the connection between political leaders and vote choice, including research on the development of leader effects over time (for instance the personalization of politics or presidentialization of politics), the psychology behind leader effects, the conditionality of leader effects, leader effects on different types of voting behavior (for instance voter turnout, vote switchers and strategically voting), the role of the media in purportedly enhancing the importance of leaders, and methodological refinements for studying leadership effects. The panel welcomes papers employing experimental designs, survey studies or other relevant methods. Papers that explicitly aim to strengthen our understanding of the causality involved in leader effects are encouraged. In addition, we are also particularly interested in papers with a comparative design, for instance comparing party leaders within a parliamentary system, comparing multiple parliamentary systems, or comparing parliamentary democracies with presidential systems.

Title	Details
The Personalization of Partisan Attitudes: Panel Evidence from the Italian Case	View Paper Details
One For All or All For One: The Electoral Effects of Personalised Campaigning	View Paper Details
Vote Choice and Leader Support in a Campaign Perspective	View Paper Details
To Whom do Leaders Matter? Characteristics of Individual Voters that Moderate Leadership Effects	View Paper Details
The Importance of Leader Selection and Party Finance for Leader Effects in Europe	View Paper Details