Major Party Leaders Research Articles

Is Negative Campaigning a Response to a Dynamic Polling Environment? Evidence from Facebook and Twitter Posts by German Party Leaders in the 2021 German Federal Election

ABSTRACT Do negative campaigning strategies evolve in sync with a party leader’s position in public opinion polls? In Germany’s multi-party system, previous research during the traditional media era found that a chancellor candidate’s drop in the polls did not impact negativity. This study focuses on the dynamic campaign in the 2021 Federal Election, which is the most competitive campaign to date in the social media era as there was no incumbent chancellor candidate. The prevalence of negative campaigning by six major party leaders who made a total of n = 3580 posts on Facebook and Twitter from 1 March to Election Day on 25 September 2021 is studied here. Negative posts accounted for 7.7 per cent of total posts. Results also show that a chancellor candidate’s position in the polls matters: Front-runners are less likely to rely on negative campaigning, but as candidates drop down in the polls from being the main challenger to rank third or lower, their negative campaigning increases. During the official six-week campaign or the hot phase, the number of negative posts increases overall as Election Day approaches. Variation in the use of negative campaigning among the individual chancellor candidates is discussed as is evidence of negative campaigning prior to the hot phase.

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain Party Leader Evaluations Database, 2010–2019

Abstract The authors describe the Qualitative Election Study of Britain (qesb) Party Leader Evaluation Database, a database containing 4,119 words and phrases evaluating British political party leaders. The data were collected during pre-election focus groups and interviews with participants from England, Scotland, and Wales during the General Election campaigns of 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019. A supplementary dataset of leaders’ evaluation data from Dundee residents after the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 is also provided. To collect the data, participants viewed headshot pictures of major and minor party leaders (depending on where in Britain they lived) taken from party websites. Participants wrote down words or phrases they associated with each leader and coded their assessment as positive, negative, or neutral. These data are suitable for content, sentiment, and discourse analysis or analytic generalization.

Information and campaign effects in the 2023 Australian Voice referendum

ABSTRACT Referendums differ from general elections in the choices that are offered to voters and in the cues that are available to them to reach a decision. This difference makes the quantity and quality of the information that is available during a referendum campaign crucial to the outcome. This paper uses a unique panel survey to examine the role of the campaign in shaping the outcome of the October 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum. We find that the political cues offered to voters – reflected most prominently in voters’ views about the major party leaders – were the most important campaign effects shaping the result. Interpersonal communication also mattered, but government-supplied information and mass media exposure had no effect. The findings highlight the central role that a campaign driven by elites plays in shaping the outcome of a referendum.

An Examination of the Policy Content of Scott Morrison's and Anthony Albanese's 2022 Federal Election Campaign Materials

This Research Note reports on an analysis of the speeches, media releases, opinion pieces, and transcripts of the utterances of both major party leaders, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, during the 2022 federal election campaign. We undertake a reflexive thematic analysis of these documents to identify the key messages of the two campaigns.

The politics and impact of party leader visits in Australia

ABSTRACT Local visits by party leaders are an integral part of election campaigning around the world. In the age of media-driven elections, do they matter? How are local contests selected for a visit? Most importantly, what effect do they have on the vote? Using a unique dataset covering local visits by the major party leaders during the 2013 and 2022 Australian federal election campaigns, we address these questions. We find that marginality is the main criterion for selecting a seat for a visit, followed by its geographical location. Leader visits in 2013 mattered more to the vote than in 2022. We explain the differences between the two elections and the four leaders by the relative standing of each of the leaders among voters. Overall, we conclude that the electoral impact of a leader visit is modest and context-dependent.

Electoral System Reform and the Politics of Policy Change

As women’s participation in the workforce expands, many countries seek to reform child care support by changing the gender division of labor. Japan also attempted universalistic child care support reforms, though these were not always successful. The electoral reforms of the 1990s prompted the major political parties to make universalistic reforms, and the major party leaders advocated similar ideas. Still, they failed to extend benefits to all children. Agreement on the expansion of funding was particularly challenging. By analyzing coalition formation within and among political parties, I show that the electoral reform led to stiff competition, which made it difficult for parties to agree. The change to a majoritarian electoral system not only intensified inter-party rivalry but also made it difficult to persuade intra-party groups that perceived a threat to their electoral success.

Imaginary lock-ins in climate change politics: the challenge to envision a fossil-free future

ABSTRACT Various path dependencies and carbon lock-ins prevent ambitious climate action. In this study, we develop and apply the concept of imaginary lock-ins, or the challenge to envision a decarbonized future beyond the status quo of a fossil-dependent society. We propose a typology of competing imaginaries attached to climate action. Specifically, we distinguish between techno-optimism, ecological modernization, disruptive innovations, and system change. We then explore these competing imaginaries for the case of Sweden. The country plans to become the world’s first fossil-free welfare state by 2045. Based on documents, interviews with stakeholders inside and outside the multi-stakeholder initiative Fossil Free Sweden, and an interview series with all major Swedish party leaders, we illuminate the contested imaginaries of a fossil-free future. While techno-optimism and ecological modernization largely suppress more radical or transformative imaginaries, imaginary lock-ins allow us to assess the potentials and limitations of an initiative to orchestrate climate action.

Climate Change in the 2019 Canadian Federal Election

In the weeks before the 2019 federal election, climate change strikes occurred in Canada and across the globe, which may have increased the salience of this policy issue. We use two data sources to examine the role of climate change in the 2019 federal election: a representative survey of 1500 Canadians and 2109 Facebook posts from the five major party leaders. After accounting for political ideology and region, we find that concern about climate change was a strong positive predictor of liberal support. We triangulate these findings by analyzing Facebook posts. We find that left-wing politicians were more likely to post about climate change and that posts about climate change received more likes, comments, and shares than other posts. This higher level of user engagement did not differ depending on which political party posted the climate change message. The combination of sources offers news insights into citizen-elite interactions and electoral outcomes. Climate change was important in the election, whether this importance was measured through survey data or user engagement with leaders’ climate change posts.

“I’LL BE BACK…”: The chance of a political comeback as party leader

Political leadership has become increasingly volatile in recent times, as experienced directly by many of the leaders of both major parties in Australia over the last few decades who have been ousted by their own party. While some of these leaders have returned to power, others have faded away into history. Political capital can play a key role in the demise or reclaim of leadership and an immediate response can become critical not only in preventing any further loss of political capital but to begin the re-building of political capital towards a return to a leadership position. This study examined ousted political leaders and the likelihood of a return to leadership. Attribution theory was applied to the first press conference given by six Australian major party leaders immediately after having lost their leadership and were analysed thematically to show what the attributional causes of their successes and failures were during their tenure as party leader. The results indicate that what one says and how one says it can be important for their prospects of returning to the seat of power. The major party leaders who returned to power tended to acknowledge successes due to the collective group, while the other major party leaders tended to attribute the successes to themselves and failures on external factors, including their own collective group. The results illustrate the importance of how one handles one’s downfall in order to climb back up.

The 2015 Qualitative Election Study of Britain

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain (qesb) is the first (and only) qualitative longitudinal dataset to investigate political attitudes and voting behaviour over multiple elections and referendums in the United Kingdom. During the 2015ukgeneral election over 90 voters participated in 23 focus groups across England, Scotland, and Wales before and after polling day. These participants represented a range of political party supporters and independent voters, age groups, and economic backgrounds. They discussed a range of political issues including their vote choice in the election, their impressions of the major party leaders, why they would consider voting (or never voting) for a political party, and their expectations for the country moving forward. Special focus groups were also held around the three leaders’ debates. The 2015qesbalso brought back participants who had participated in the 2010qesbfocus groups and the 2014 Scottish referendum focus groups. The 2015qesbhas created a unique panel of participants whose political opinions can be tracked across multiple elections. The project also includes questions that were asked in prior election focus groups and has replicated, with some modifications, the research design of the previous wave of the study.

‘The new but lonely voice against the authoritarianism’: humor and irony in Turkish political discourse after the Taksim Gezi Park Protests

This study investigates the diffusion of a new political language based on humour and irony into Turkish politics. The Taksim Gezi Park Protests, in addition to introducing a new subject to Turkish politics, led to a new language that places humour at the centre. The Government’s neoliberal and authoritarian policies and tight control over traditional media shaped the resistance to be humoristic and indirect. People used alternative media to voice their dissent, mainly in the form of social media messages in addition to street performances, graffiti, videos and murals. This new wave of humour, which I prefer to call the “public square humour” emphasised creativity, improvisation and pluralism via the usage of traditional conversational humour mechanisms of the Turkish folk narratives. I investigate the effect of this new wave of humour on the professional politicians over the course of following years after the protests in an increasingly authoritarian political climate. I analyse the Twitter messages of four major party leaders and politicians who are active in Twitter, both qualitatively and quantitatively. With the methods of the discourse analysis I identify the political parties that embrace the new language of the political opposition. Finally, I conclude that Demirtas embraces the public square humour better and makes use of it to underline the transformation of HDP (People’s Democratic Party) from a defendant of ethnic politics to the representative of the new voice of Turkish political opposition.

Picture That: Canada’s 2015 Federal Campaign Through Instagram Images

Social media is changing the landscape of elections. It opens a new sphere for politicians and political parties to connect with citizens. Now more than ever before we are seeing our political leaders turning to social networking sites in order to campaign and disseminate information, and the Canadian 2015 federal election was a prime example of this. All three major party leaders took to social media as a campaign tactic, but how these leaders make use of social media images has gone relatively unexamined. In this research study I ask what are the common theme(s) evident in all three major party leaders’ Instagram feeds during the 2015 election campaign? And a sub-question derived from this asks: what sorts of latent campaign tactics are suggested by these themes? In order to answer these questions I use a mixed-method approach, both a visual content analysis and discourse analysis are employed using a small sample extrapolated from Instagram. In summation, two major themes are apparent in all three leaders’ Instagram pages: The Crowd Pleaser and The Family Man, both of which have underlining political agendas.

Presidentialization of Japanese Politics? Examining Political Leader Evaluations and Vote Choice

AbstractIn recent years, the impact of party leaders on voting behavior has attracted increasing attention, leading some scholars to identify a phenomenon of ‘presidentialization’. Many extant studies of this topic in Japan are limited to one or two electoral cycles. In order to trace long-term trends, this paper analyses longitudinal survey data to investigate the existence and magnitude of the effect party leader evaluations exert on vote choice in Japan. Empirical results show that while only dominant and forceful personalities substantially influenced voters' likelihood of supporting their parties in the 1980s and 1990s, by the 2000s assessments of most major party leaders had a significant impact on their parties' electoral performance. In short, party leaders affect vote choice due not to their personalities, but instead to the position they hold. We also test the hypotheses that the association between leader appraisal and voting behavior would be particularly conspicuous among voters who lack party identification and those who are most heavily exposed to media reportage. Analysis reveals that (1) independent voters are not more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations than partisans; (2) a leader effect is found more frequently among voters with greater exposure to election coverage on television.

Gendered Voting at the 2010 Federal Election

While considerable variations in gendered voting patterns exist across nations, in the US, at least since the 1980s, women have tended to favour parties of the left while men support parties of the right (Edlund and Pande 2002; Giger 2009). Across European countries alternatively, there is a degree of inconsistency in gendered voting patterns. For example, in some countries women have shifted toward parties of the left while elsewhere ‘women are still found to vote more conservatively’ (Giger 2009, 475). The latter pattern resembles the Australian case, where women have tended to favour conservative parties at federal elections, traditionally voting for the Liberal Party over the Australian Labor Party (ALP) (Renfrow 1994). In the 2010 Australian federal election however, this pattern was overturned; women voters clearly favoured the ALP for the first time since Australian election survey data have been collected. Clear differences in voting behaviour along gender lines had not been seen at Australian federal elections for the last three decades (Leigh 2005; Pietsch, Graetz and McAllister 2010; Studlar, McAllister and Hayes 1998). In Australia the pattern has resembled either the ‘traditional’ model of female support for conservative parties or a ‘gender dealignment’ pattern where only minimal gender differences in voting are apparent (see Inglehart and Norris 2000). Yet the last election was distinctive. For the first time in Australia since 1916, a sitting prime minister (Kevin Rudd) was deposed before serving a single term of office and replaced by his deputy Julia Gillard, who went on to become Australia's first female prime minister. The reasons for this momentous leadership change have been described in detail elsewhere (see, for example, Williams 2011). This note concentrates on the issue of gender as it relates to federal voting and in particular, the relationship between gender-differentiated voting patterns and voter perceptions of major party leaders. Although Australian Election Study (AES) data from 1987–2007 indicate only weak gendered voting patterns over the 20 years prior to the 2010 election, in 2010 women were far more likely than men to vote for the Labor Party. While some explain this gender differential in terms of ‘convergence’ (Renfrow 1994), sex-based segregation of the workforce (Leithner 1997), or unionisation (Haswell 2000), this paper advances an alternative explanation. The extent of gender-differentiated voting in 2010 is reduced considerably once voter evaluations of the Labor leader are controlled; indicating that the gendered voting pattern reported in the 2010 Australian federal election may be at least partly related to the way voters evaluated the new prime minister, Julia Gillard.

Party Leaders as Movers and Shakers in British Campaigns? Results from the 2010 Election

There is an increasing recognition of the importance of party leaders in British elections. The 2010 election only served to reinforce their perceived importance with the introduction of three leaders’ debates. Thus, more than ever, an understanding of contemporary elections necessitates an understanding of the dimensions of leadership that matter most to voters. This contribution examines the influence of perceptions of the three major party leaders as responsive, trustworthy, and knowledgeable. It also examines how the debates and other events unfolding during the campaign served to structure these perceptions. There is evidence that voters’ evaluations of party leaders can vary substantially over the course of the campaign and traits such as responsiveness weigh heavily in voters’ assessments. There is also convincing evidence of media effects, suggesting that voters are receptive to events unfolding during the campaign.

Emotional Responses to Top Politicians in a General Election

Abstract Voting behaviour has been studied as a specific form of individual behaviour and has primarily been seen as the result of reflection and deliberation on behalf of the individual. In general consumer behaviour research, the focus is increasingly on the seemingly unconscious and emotionally controlled processes that seem to shape a large part of consumer responses to brands, services and communication. The objective of this paper is to study the influence that emotional reactions have on voter behaviour in connection with a general election. The opportunity arose to carry out a pre- and a post-evaluation of voters’ emotional responses to 6 major party leaders. The results support the notion that constant or increasing positive emotional reaction does in fact accompany election success, whilst election failure is accompanied by decreasing levels of emotional response. The results and their implications for political marketing in the context of an election are discussed.

Election 2006: Party leaders debate the health of the nation

As the January 23 federal election looms, health care is featuring prominently in the platforms and the speeches of all major party leaders, as well as in the concerns of voters. CMAJ asked all 4 leaders for interviews to respond to our questions about health care policy. None of the leaders would

The politics of educational exchange: Turkish education in Eurasia

This article assesses the role of educational exchange as a foreign policy tool.1 It investigates public and private educational ties that were established between Turkey and Turkic populations of ...

Political Personalities and Voting in the 1999 Australian Constitutional Referendum

This study presents evidence on two questions relating to research into the influence of leadership on mass political behaviour: the impact of leaders on voting in referendums and the influence of non-institutionalised political personalities. Research in Australia demonstrating that voter evaluations of leading politicians affect party choice in national elections has emphasised that in general it is only the current or recent leaders of the major parties who have an impact. Research through the 1990s has also shown that attitudes towards the major party leaders have consistently influenced voter stances on the question of whether Australia should become a republic. In the November 1999 republican referendum, the leaders of the two opposing campaigns – Malcolm Turnbull and Kerry Jones – were not mainstream politicians or party political figures at all. This paper uses data from the 1999 Australian Constitutional Referendum Study to investigate the extent to which responses to the leading personalities shaped voting decisions in the referendum and in particular to determine whether voters focused more on the republican and monarchist campaign leaders or on the leaders of the major political parties.

Asymmetric Federalism and Coalition-Making in Belgium

This article examines the asymmetric aspects of Belgian federalism. The term “asymmetry” covers many meanings. The cultural, socioeconomic, political party, and formal-institutional differences between the regions of the Belgian federation clearly make Belgium a strong case of asymmetry. However, these asymmetric features have largely been neutralized by preferences of the major-party leaders for building symmetric or congruent government coalitions in the federal and regional arenas. The article not only explains why Belgian party elites have acted accordingly but also demonstrates that the genuine meaning of asymmetry cannot be understood properly without putting the concept of asymmetry into the framework of party politics. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.