Let the Voter Name it! Self-Reported Logics of Favourability to Party Leaders and their Roots

The secret of political leadership, captivating souls of ordinary citizens in daily and electoral competition, is yet to be revealed. On the one hand, a broad field of intellectual debates on representative democracy holds to the power of party ties and partisanship to explain fundamental structures of popular sentiment and attitudes towards political leaders (Weisburg, 2008; Bartels, 2000; Achen, Bartels, 2016). On the other hand, along the rise of partisan dealignment and emerging ‘apartisan’ identity (Dalton, 2012) in ‘old‘, Western democracies, and continuous electoral volatility in new European democracies (Tavits, 2008; Ramonaite, 2014), mushrooming literature on personalization of politics brings politicians’ individuality, personality, bodily appearance, communicative style and public image to the fore of citizens’ perceptual grids and decisions (Garzia, 2011, 2014; Corner, Pels, 2003; Caprara, Zimbardo, 2004; Bystrom et al, 2004; Brusattin, 2012; Archetti, 2013; Kavaliauskaite, 2014). However, due to the vast variety of factors, proposed to reveal why voters become adherents of one or another politician, or why certain (types of) voters choose and cling to particular political leaders, existing empirical research tends to suffer from a reductionist focus on a single explanatory factor or a limited set of ‘sinister’ variables to unravel the nature of voters’ preference for leaders, abstaining from broader and integrating conceptual frameworks. Moreover, quantitative studies in the area (surveys, quasi-experiments) prioritize pre-defined stimuli, ready-made, closed lists of attributes, motives or arguments, asking research participants ‘fit into’ scholarly models which, at the same time, limit both the freedom of participants to express themselves in their own terms, and the scope of analyzed aspects of cognitive mapping of political leadership. In contrast, the proposed paper is based on the fresh data of the national representative survey (Lithuanian national election study 2016, N=1500), offering authentic answers to open-ended questions on why Lithuanians like and/ or dislike selected leaders of major national political parties. Using mixed method approach, the paper, firstly, aims to reveal the nature and complex structure of citizens’ reported favourability grounds and positive accounts on party leaders (qualitative aspect); secondly, re-embedding the latter (recoded) data into the overall set of survey data, the study explores the ‘roots’ of citizens’ logics of favourability towards party leaders, focusing on the origins of variation in affective ‘styles’, and the question what ‘styles’ and/or positive articulations of political leadership fall in/ fall from the classical model of partisan alignment (quantitative aspect).