Long Shadows: The Persistent Impact of Strong Leaders

Strong leaders are assumed to benefit their political parties. They set out the party’s vison and ideology, perhaps with a new distinctive policy. They reinvigorate the organisation, often by taking personal control, and using their own ideology and personality to reach beyond a party’s traditional base. They can use that organisation to fashion an electoral strategy that creates a new coalition of support. The strong leader becomes the focus of the party’s electoral strategy and the face through which the organisation sells itself. But there is evidence that strong leaders actually leave their parties in worse shape than they found them, and that parties may be better off in the medium to long term without the initial bounce the leader gives. It is not clear why this is the case. The leader might ‘damage’ the party by deinstitutionalising the organisation, over-promising in elections, or taking the party in a too radical policy direction. They might suppress debate, postponing necessary conflict until after their departure. This paper takes three distinct types of ‘strong leaders’ studies how each changed their parties and how this had an impact on the party long after the leader departed. The three leaders, Thatcher, Papandreou, and Haughey are different, one an ideologue, one a populist and one a transactional ‘player’. We are interested in seeing whether the effect of a strong leader is different for the different types of leader.