What can he do for us? Leader effects on party fortunes in Ireland

Abstract

Many party leaders have been held responsible for the electoral fortunes of their parties, with their parties' popularity being deemed dependent upon their own. Reasons for this link suggested in the literature include some global properties of the political system or electorate, party-specific factors, the style of particular leaders, and whether the party is in or out of government. This article conducts some exploratory analyses of opinion poll data on the popularity of Irish parties and their leaders, to assess both the extent of the link and some of the explanations. Use is made of correlation analysis, some time-series methods, various tests for Granger causality, and popularity functions estimated by ordinary least squares (OLS). The results indicate a consistent link in the case of Fianna Fáil, but the relationships for other parties prove to be conditional on being in government. The findings do not support global or leader-specific explanations, but give strong weight to a contextual factor for all parties, and indicate the need for an additional party-specific explanation for Fianna Fáil.