Career Types of Electoral Leaders in Parliamentary Democracies: Evidence from Multichannel Sequence Analysis

Electoral leaders play a crucial role in their parties’ campaigns for parliamentary elections. Not only do they promote their parties’ platforms, but research on personalization and leader effects shows that electoral leaders themselves become an important factor shaping election outcomes. Therefore, selecting an electoral leader is a critical strategic decision for parties heading into a parliamentary election. Here, parties must weigh internal and external considerations. Internally, the existing power structures within the party leadership determine who is considered for this role. Given the significance of this position, parties pay close attention to potential candidates' track records. Externally, parties need to evaluate the appeal of any prospective candidate to core voters and beyond. In this context of diverse demands placed on electoral leaders, the careers within the parties provide valuable insight into the types of leaders parties favor. Career paths matter because it is through their careers that politicians gain the skills and experience necessary, allowing parties to evaluate them for future roles. Despite their significance, comparative findings on the political careers of electoral leaders remain scarce. While party leaders, as a well-studied subject, are often considered natural candidates for electoral leaders, many parties also select other individuals for this role. This study, therefore, establishes electoral leaders as a distinct subject of comparative inquiry. First, using multichannel sequence analysis and subsequent cluster analysis, this study identifies career types among 500 electoral leaders across 17 parliamentary democracies from 1960 to 2020. The multichannel approach captures the simultaneous development of careers across three arenas: the extra-parliamentary party, the party in parliament, and the party in government. As a result, politicians develop varying career focuses, which are reflected in the identified career types. The second part of the analysis looks for patterns in how career types are distributed across countries, parties, and individual-level factors. Additionally, the long observation period makes it possible to investigate whether the prominence of certain career types changes over time as parties adapt to an increasingly personalized and digitalized era.