Recent trends in party organisation in Europe include a tendency for leaders to be selected directly either by members or even by electors in open primaries, as well as an increasing dependence on the State. In this paper we focus on the way in which these two trends may have an impact on leader effects. In order to do so, we test two hypotheses: the degree to which parties who select leaders directly, and parties who are more dependent on state financing, are those where leader effects are most important in voting behaviour. We use a new dataset which combines the CSES electoral data on European countries and data on political parties across the European Union . We thus seek to understand the way in which parties and their characteristics are important for voters and their political choices, and maybe increasingly so in the future.
