The Survival of Party Leaders and Party Organizational Change

Political parties are central to modern democracy and -with the growing shift of power toward party leaders documented by recent literature - party leaders have become more important than ever before. The literature on the survival of party leaders puts emphasis on the effect of the continuity in leadership of the party on political success (Ishiyama and Stewart, 2019; Werkmann and Ghergina, 2016). But what happens if there is almost no change in party leadership? Is the party organization going to stay the same when it is ruled by the same leader? Are there specific features of party organizations that are affected more by duration of party leaders? The questions above are left unexplored. A change in party leadership is an important event for a party organization (Somer-Topcu, 2017). I construct an original dataset in which I include all of my variables for all minimally democratic countries since 1980. The result suggests that the longer a party leader stays in power, the leadership and candidate selection process will become more inclusive while the decision-making (personnel and policies) will become less inclusive. Organizational complexity and the concentration of formal powers on the leadership increase with the increase in the time spent in power as a party leader.