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Historically, both Belgium and the Netherlands are archetypes of ‘consociational democracies’. These are characterized by broad multi-party coalitions, numerous power-sharing devices, and fragile checks and balances in order to ensure due influence for all relevant parties and minority groups. Hence, the overarching logic of these consensus democracies seems to represent an obstacle to a process of presidentialization.

However, we argue that the need for strong leadership resulted in more prominent and powerful positions for the (parliamentary) party leaders and Prime Ministers. We present evidence of a process of presidentialization that gained momentum a decade earlier in the Netherlands (from the 1970s onwards) than it did in Belgium (from the 1980s).

It is interesting to note that the increased autonomy of Prime Ministers is not due to constitutional amendments, but tends to be linked to the increased decision-making role for the inner cabinet, the professionalization of the Prime Minister’s Office, and the growing attention the audiovisual media give to the Prime Minister.

Similarly, parliamentary party leaders in The Netherlands and extra-parliamentary party leaders in Belgium grew stronger through an accumulation of power and resources at the leader’s office, personalized campaigning and a centralization of control over inner party selection procedures, and party leadership selection.

Elections are widely believed to have become beauty contests in which voters decide who to vote for on the basis of which party leader they like most, rather than which party they think has the best policies or will best represent their interests. Scant evidence was found in support of this proposition. Voters’ evaluations of party leaders appear to be as important or unimportant now as they were when they were first measured. Part of the reason for this appears to be the fact that the importance of leaders is constrained by the political structure in which elections take place. There is strong evidence that leaders matter when a parliamentary election comes closest to mimicking a presidential contest. That is, when the next head of government is likely to be the leader of whichever of two large parties can win the most votes without the need to engage in significant post-election coalition bargaining.

Sweden is undoubtedly a parliamentary democracy. Indeed, many felt that the legislature had become too strong, and the executive too weak. But recently, this argument has been turned round. The Social Democratic Prime Minister, Göran Persson, has frequently been described as a ‘presidential’ figure. Has Sweden become presidentialized?

Organizational changes, including the empowerment of the Prime Minister's Office and the country's accession to the EU in 1994, have certainly enhanced the chief executive's resources. Just as important, though, has been the interaction of the Swedish style of ‘negative parliamentarism’ and the contemporary party system. While the Left bloc has a parliamentary majority, the practical consequence is to make any alternative to a Social Democratic prime minister highly unlikely. With full control of his party, his position becomes nearly impregnable. Other ministers are increasingly recruited from outside parliament, as in a presidential system. When it comes to the electoral face, the picture is less clear. The media are certainly more party-leader-focused. But persuasive evidence that this also applies to voting behaviour has not (yet) been found. In sum, Sweden has become somewhat ‘presidentialized’. But electoral shifts, especially if they lead to change in the party system, could set the process back.

This chapter adapts the dynamic model of multiparty competition to take into account the possibility that party leaders take their own preferences into account when they set party policy. If they do this, they must make trade-offs between satisfying their private policy preferences and some other objective, whether this is maximizing party vote share or pleasing current party supporters. Models that specify such trade-offs have often been found intractable using traditional analytical techniques. However, they are straightforward to specify and analyze using computational agent-based modeling, though this does require a rethinking of the types of decision rules that party leaders might use. The chapter finds an analogue of the earlier finding that insatiable party leaders may win fewer votes than satiable leaders. Leaders who care only about their party's vote share may win fewer votes over the long haul than leaders who also care about their own policy preferences.

The selectorate is the body that selects a political party's candidates for public office. We classify the selectorate according to levels of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness. The most inclusive selectorates are all the voters, while a highly inclusive selectorates are all the party members – both of whom can partake in primaries, depending on the conditions set for participation. An in‐between selectorate is made up of selected party agencies or party delegates. The highly exclusive selectorates are either the party elite or the most exclusive nominating entity of a single leader. This chapter distinguishes between three complexities concerning the selectorate: the assorted, the multistaged, and the weighted candidate selection methods. The selectorate imposes the most significant consequences on politicians, parties, and parliaments – more than any other dimension of candidate selection.

This chapter considers how party leaders should be chosen in parliamentary democracies and how they should be held to account. Party leaders are too important, both within the party and generally within a country’s politics, to allow the choice to be restricted to parliamentarians. An argument is thus made for inclusion of grassroots members in the selection. Nonetheless, one of the key responsibilities of the leader is to lead the party in parliament. Parliamentarians typically know potential leaders well, having had opportunity to observe their strengths and weaknesses first-hand. An ideal process involves both groups of the party in the choice of a leader and in the potential removal of the incumbent. Beyond this, parties have very different approaches to leadership selection that reflect their unique democratic and organizational needs and imperatives and these are to be encouraged and not stamped out by insisting on uniformity of process or invoking significant state regulation.

This chapter investigates the implications of having a very large and diverse set of decision rules that any party leader might use. It defines two completely new vote-seeking rule “species.” It also identifies a range of parameterized “features” of all decision rules, such as the “speed” at which party policy is changed, or the extent to which party leaders are “satisfied” with any given vote share. The chapter investigates “only” 111 different decision rules in order to focus on parsimonious models that generate easily interpretable results. These results also give good intuitions about dynamic multiparty competition when party leaders may choose from a large and diverse rule set.

This chapter argues that political parties are central players in contemporary western democracies and that their leaders are powerful figures. Party leaders are increasingly important in all spheres of party activity including determination of policy positions, setting and executing campaign strategy, and internal organizational decision-making. This is particularly true in the Anglophone parliamentary democracies in which leaders are the indisputable heads of their parties and fill the key roles of Prime Minister and leaders of the opposition. Notwithstanding the importance of party leaders, there is little comprehensive, cross national study of leadership politics. Leadership contests often take place behind the closed door of the party room. The result is limited scholarly attention paid to how leaders are chosen and removed and the nature of leadership politics. This chapter explains how data were collected from twenty-five parties covering the period from 1965 to 2008 and how these are used to illuminate the questions set out above.

This chapter explores three of the defining characteristics of leadership politics: competitiveness of contests, who wins, and leaders’ longevity. Leadership contests are often not competitive as many are decided by acclamation, and when there is a contest the front runner is often an easy winner. Party leaders are disproportionately male and most have significant parliamentary experience. The impact of selection and removal rules on these three dimensions is considered with some significant differences on each measure found depending on the rules parties adopt relating to who selects the leader and their relative security once in office. For example, parties with expanded selectorates are more likely to choose leaders with less parliamentary experience.

This chapter analyzes the role of the party as a gatekeeper to running for U.S. Senate and delves more deeply into the role of the political party as an organization in the state legislature. It measures the function of partisanship in structuring the organization of state legislatures as well as examines how partisanship influenced the dynamics of Senate elections. It explains the role of party caucuses in the nomination and election stages of indirect elections; shows how party leaders identified and rallied around Senate candidates; and identifies the set of incentives that party leaders used to pressure state legislators to back their preferred Senate candidate. Furthermore, it discusses how candidates for U.S. Senate tried to consolidate support among key party leaders, and how regional party factionalism made that task more difficult. To illustrate these behaviors, the chapter includes case studies from a range of years and states, including New York, Kentucky, Washington State, Florida, and Illinois.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book started with the twin premises that understanding multiparty competition is a core concern for everyone interested in representative democracy and that multiparty competition should be understood as an evolving dynamic system, not a stationary state. Given these premises, it investigated the dynamics of multiparty competition using computational agent-based modeling, a new technology that is ideally suited to providing systematic answers to the types of question we want to ask. This allows the modeling of decision making by party leaders, in what is clearly an analytically intractable setting, in terms of the informal rules of thumb that might be used by real human beings, rather than the formally provable best response strategies used by traditional formal theorists. Whether people use the dynamic model of multiparty competition or some better model of this vital but complex political process, there is no doubt that the computational approach deployed in this book offers vast potential to ask and answer interesting and important questions.

This chapter arrives at the apex of power in the Conservative Party—the Leader of the Party. It analyses the office of Party Leader: their rise to the top, the machinery by which they ‘emerge’ or are chosen, their roles and duties in that post, and the mechanisms and difficulties involved in their removal. The styles of leadership exhibited by the five Leaders of the period are also considered and compared. The second part of the chapter focuses upon a fact that, whilst apparently politically dominant and electorally successful, the Conservative Party between 1920 and 1940 was almost constantly affected by internal disunity which manifested as visible dissent and public opposition to the Leader or his policy. The final part of this chapter focuses on the four main crises of the Coalition in 1921–22, protectionism in 1929–31, India in 1929–35 and ‘appeasement’ in 1936–39 are considered first in terms of various common themes and patterns, and then the causes and outcome are examined in each case.

This chapter assesses why the prodemocracy parties were sidelined by student leaders during the Umbrella Movement. It also investigates the conflicts between the leaders of student bodies and the prodemocracy parties, which affected the trajectory of the Umbrella Movement. One factor accounting for the sidelining of the prodemocracy parties was that Beijing had largely enervated the prodemocracy parties' capacity in the legislature to shape policies via institutional and noninstitutional components of the nonsovereign, hybrid regime of Hong Kong. The debilitation made the parties irrelevant in addressing public needs and thereby eroded the public's trust in the parties and contributed to their decline, as has been found in many Western democracies. Beijing's engineering alone, however, cannot fully explain the decline of those parties. The parties' conscious choices with regard to positioning and tactics, amid an increasingly divided public, were also relevant to their decline. Indeed, the students' tactics contrasted sharply with those of the party leaders, who mostly preferred to halt the prolonged occupation in order to shorten the street inconvenience and diminish the risk of voters' backlash in impending elections.

This chapter addresses the importance of leadership effects in 2016. It assesses the impact of the leaders of the four main parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin) in influencing the vote for their parties. Overall, the chapter finds some evidence that party leadership mattered in this election, but not a lot. The Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, was the most popular of the leaders yet this did not translate into significant additional votes for his party. By contrast, the leaders of Fine Gael (Enda Kenny) and Sinn Féin (Gerry Adams), though less popular, were better at influencing the turnout of their base of supporters.

Leaders have become the human face of election campaigns, while electorates have become dealigned. This has led to the suggestion that in parliamentary elections many voters now vote for the party leader they like best in much the same way that in presidential elections they vote for the candidate they like best. This chapter uses Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project data to assess whether there is any systematic evidence to support this expectation for either all or some parliamentary elections. While leadership evaluations are relatively more important in parliamentary elections that take place where a two-party system is in place, and where a majoritarian electoral system is used, they are still far less important than they are in presidential contests.

This chapter examines the effects of party leaders on the vote. It tests the following hypotheses: first, that party leader popularity has a fairly substantial impact on the vote in most political systems irrespective of electoral procedures; second, that party leaders over time have become a greater influence on the vote; third, that to the extent that we find leader effects on the vote, we expect them to be more pronounced in elections characterized by relatively low degrees of party polarization; and fourth, that party leader effects on the vote are larger in countries employing plurality/majoritarian electoral systems than in countries using proportional systems. The results show that in the United States, leader effects are stronger than party effects in presidential elections. In countries using plurality/majoritarian electoral systems, leader effects are less strong than party effects, but leader effects tend nevertheless to be sizeable and non-trivial. In countries that use proportional list systems, party effects are much stronger than leader effects, which does not mean that leader effects are non-existent in these countries, but that they are in most cases close to trivial.