The Determinants of Party Leadership Change: Italy in Comparative Perspective

In this paper, we explore how party leadership changes in Italy. To this aim, the general concept of ‘leadership change’ is partitioned into two dimensions. Turnover is the substitution of an incumbent leader by a newly selected party head. Renewal is a particular case of turnover taking place when a young, female or inexperienced leader is selected. After defining and proposing a measure of these concepts, we address the question of which variables influence them. Given that the inclusiveness of the selectorate is often argued to affect the outcome of the races, we test its relationship with leadership change by using a number of control variables, among which electoral results, participation in government and party ideology. Based party on a comparative database on party leaders’ selections (COSPAL – Comparative Study of Party Leaders dataset, Pilet and Cross 2014), which includes more than 100 parties from 13 parliamentary democracies for the 1965-2012 period, and on original data on Italy (2012-2017) we analyze the determinants of leadership change and renewal of party leadership profiles in Italy and briefly compare the Italian case with other Western European countries. Our results show that inclusive selectorates strongly boost leadership change.