Parties and Leader Effects in Europe

This paper builds on a previous research on the impact of parties for leader effects (Lobo, 2008). Individuals who voted for electoralist parties in Europe were more likely use leaders as cues than individuals who voted for programmatic parties. The previous paper was based on a limited sample of countries and used expert assessments on the nature of parties. Here we expand our number of countries and also characterize parties in a more objective way. Using a new dataset which combines the CSES electoral data on European countries and data on political parties across Europe which measure the degree to which leaders are central to those parties, we test the hypothesis that leaders will be more important for voters who choose parties that are more personalized. We thus seek to understand the way in which parties are important for voters and their political choices.