The Comparative Dynamics of Party Support in Great Britain: Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats

Abstract

Political leadership has long been established as a key determinant of party support. Yet the extent to which this may vary across parties in and out of government is less well understood. In fact, there are good reasons to expect leadership to matter less for “protest” parties. We demonstrate that the relationship between satisfaction with the Liberal Democratic leader and support for the British Liberal Democratic Party is fundamentally different from the relationships between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and their respective parties. Using 28 years of monthly public opinion data, we develop models of the political and economic factors that determine support for each of the three major parties in Britain in each of the 1979–1997 and 1997–2006 periods. We find that vote intentions for the two major parties are closely related to the satisfaction levels of their respective leaders but that this relationship is substantially weaker for the Liberal Democrats. These findings are in contrast to individual‐level studies that have shown the importance of leadership approval to vote choice for all British parties. More generally, we show the need to refine theories about the relationships between parties and their leaders.