The Leadership Dilemma: Do Dominant Leaders Damage Their Parties?

Party leaders are regarded as crucial to a party’s success. The right leader can offer advantages that seem to tip the electoral scales. The leader who is regarded as prime ministerial can deliver support to the party that others cannot. This is more pronounced as politics becomes more personalized, for instance due to changes in mass communication. As a result parties wish to choose a leader who can dominate the party. This paper asks whether that dominance comes with a price, and we seek to find if strong leaders damage their parties in the longer term. We argue that strong leaders actually leave their parties in worse shape when they step down for two compatible reasons. First, the new policy direction and charismatic image of strong leaders make successors seen just status-quo seekers and less attractive. Second, strong leaders prevent intra-party rivals from emerging, making potential successors less competitive, while they implement bad policies due to a “fever” of strong leaders, leaving successors faced with their negative consequences. We expect that the electoral performance of parties is below average in the next election after dominant leaders step down. We test our hypotheses by using novel expert-survey data that measure a leader's dominance of her party in fifteen democracies over thirty years.