Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters' behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media's growing tendency to portray politics in "personalistic" terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework - based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies - and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries. The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior.
The most significant development in electoral behavior research over the past several decades has been the decline in citizens' attachments to political parties, which creates new patterns of electoral politics in a dealigned era. Leaders without Partisans analyses these dealignment trends, and more importantly the implications of dealignment and the interactions with other processes of change. -- Russell J. Dalton, University of California Irvine
Andrea de Angelis is a researcher in political science at the European University Institute, Florence. His research is on media, economic information and political behaviour in Western democracies. His interests also include VAAs, Italian politics and Quantitative Methods. He holds an MSc in Economics and Social Science from Bocconi University, Milan.
Frederico Ferreira da Silva is a Senior SNSF Researcher at the University of Lausanne.
Diego Garzia is an SNSF Eccellenza Professor of Political Science at the University of Lausanne, and also a recurring Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Fiesole. He held a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute (2012–2014) and an SNSF Ambizione Fellowship at the University of Lucerne (2017–2019). He currently serves as founding convenor of the ECPR Research Network on Voting Advice Applications and as a member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian National Election Study (ITANES). With ECPR Press, he has already published Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates (2014).
