Electoral Messiah or Party Label? Quantifying and Investigating Leader-Party Relationships in German Federal Elections 1998–2021

Abstract

While the personalization of politics thesis has received support when exploring the supply side of politics and the media's coverage of elections and campaigns, the unmediated impact of leaders on vote choice (demand-side behavioral personalization) is debated. Most scholars agree that leaders can and do influence the vote, but the extent, circumstances, and pathways for this to occur, notably distinct from voter assessments of the party, remains contested. Using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we explore demand-side behavioral personalization in German Federal elections between 1998–2021, with a particular focus on the 2021 contest, where leadership was arguably an especially salient feature of the campaign. We offer a quantification of the phenomenon – first in the form of a vote-leader/party favorite alignment index and second by separating the impact of leader and party popularity on the vote in the 2021 contest, including provision for temporal and reciprocal dynamics. In doing so, we comprehensively examine leader-inclined voting while testing whether the 2021 contest represented a “Crossroads” contest on this dimension. Our results show leaders directly influenced vote choice in 2021, support for leader-inclined voting. Nevertheless, we find little evidence that 2021 marked a “Crossroads,” with few voters aligning their vote solely with their favorite leader, a pattern detected in all German elections between 1998 and 2021. Conspicuously, substantially more voters report aligning their vote with their favorite party. Further, our analysis illustrates that the association between leader popularity and the vote mostly trails the impact of party popularity’s connection with the vote. These results align more with the leaders minimalist school of demand-side behavioral personalization.