Who Do Parties Select as Their Electoral Leaders?

In parliamentary democracies, it is common for political parties to feature electoral leaders for parliamentary elections - irrespective of their size and status. The central task of electoral leaders is to represent their parties in electoral campaigns, while those of major parties also figure as candidates for the head of government. Accordingly, electoral leaders receive ample media attention and influence voting behavior. Despite their political relevance, there is a lack of comparative insights on whom parties choose for this position and why. I suggest answering the ‘who’ question in two different ways. The first is to look at which other leadership positions in the party organization are held by electoral leaders. The allocation of different leadership positions shows to what degree parties concentrate or divide their leadership functions. The second way refers to the prior party careers of electoral leaders. Party careers proceed on multiple tracks, as politicians can simultaneously hold positions in the extra-parliamentary party, the party in parliament, and the party in government. Different career profiles stand for different skill sets and orientations. A party’s choice for a particular electoral leader under the consideration of the allocation of other leadership functions and different career profiles speaks to how parties address challenges arising from within (organizing leadership) and from the outside (electoral arena). The empirical analysis of this study builds on two novel datasets for parliamentary parties in the German Länder between 1990 and 2018. The first dataset refers to the allocation of leadership positions within parties by capturing the names of the electoral leader, the party leader, the parliamentary leader, and the governmental party leader for each party at every election. The second dataset consists of the coded party careers of electoral leaders, following a coding scheme that considers the parallel course of party careers and the hierarchy of the various positions. I apply sequence analysis to the career data as this method can compute the similarity between careers of a large number of observations. The results show different combinations of the electoral leader role with other leadership positions and varying career profiles. These differences reveal that parties apply distinct strategies when fielding a top candidate for parliamentary elections, depending on their electoral context and balancing of party goals. Further research should study the electoral consequences of different role distributions and career profiles around electoral leaders. The broader perspective on party leadership opens avenues for future research by highlighting that the leadership of a party is rarely defined by a single position but by a structure of various positions or functions in different areas. Furthermore, the research on party leaders, in general, can benefit from taking a closer look at the course of careers. Analyzing the careers of party leaders in this way can illuminate requirements for getting into this position, possible gender differences, and the chances of survival once in office. The tools used in this analysis can be used to address these questions at a cross-national level, too.