Profiling Party Leaders: Party members‘ perceptions of ideal personality profiles for the leadership of a political party

"Leaders matter" is a key finding of contemporary leadership research. Accordingly, research on political parties has increasingly focused on the role of the individual who holds the central decision-making power in the organisational structure: the party leader. A key role in this field is played by research on the dynamics of the election and deselection of party leaders and the associated democratisation of internal party selection processes. Under the categories of leadership research, party research usually understands the party leader as an institution whose claim to leadership is derived directly from the office of party chair and is more or less firmly linked to it. This perspective makes sense in the hierarchical organisational structure of parties, but at the same time it pays little or no attention to the role of the office holder’s personality. In this PhD paper, I therefore address the question of which personalities (understood here as a composition of different traits and abilities) are considered desirable for party leaders. Embedded in the currently predominant strand of organisational party research on intra-party democracy, I do not pursue a classic leader-centred approach. Rather, from a normative perspective, leadership (or more precisely: the desirable personality of the leader) is to be analysed from the perspective of the followers, in this case the party members, who literally form the basis of the party leadership. This approach goes hand in hand with James McGregor Burns' assumption that both the trait approach and the situational-interactional approach should be adopted when analysing leadership. Methodologically, the study is based on a dataset of more than 20,000 cases collected through an online survey of members of German political parties. The main focus of the survey was the ranking and rating of 33 personality traits and skills derived from leadership research. Subsequent factor analyses (of the entire data set and differentiated according to party affiliation) extracted three desirable leader types: The 'political media idol', the 'smart commander' and the 'trust beacon'. First in-depth insights suggest that the underlying ideology or party family has little influence on the normative and desirable conceptions of party leader personalities. Overall, the study points to important research perspectives in the field of leader’s personality profiles.