The Fall of the Great: a Causal Approximation to Party Leadership Replacement in Parliamentary Democracies.

Contemporary democracy is synonymous with party democracy. Political parties aggregate citizens' preferences and organize ideologies and collective actions to compete in elections. In the current age of personalized party competition, party leaders have emerged as some of the most influential political figures. These individuals wield significant power in the day-to-day management of political organizations, shoulder the costs of collective action, and play a pivotal role in selecting candidates for public office. In parliamentary democracies, party leaders often ascend to prominent public positions, such as Member of Parliament, Minister, or even Prime Minister. Consequently, the stakes are high, and the competition to attain and maintain party leadership is fierce. Previous studies on party leadership survival have focused on stable institutional factors that influence the tenure of party leaders, emphasizing how declining electoral performance or the loss of government office can lead to leadership downfall. These studies provide a series of correlates with party leadership survival and replacement, often linked to the leader’s ability to achieve party goals and satisfy the priorities of their selectorate. While causal claims about the relationship between losing office or facing poor polling prospects and leadership tenure are both logical and intuitive, exceptions to this pattern exist. For instance, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, presents a puzzling case. Despite leading the German Social Democratic Party to its worst polling results in decades, he has been reselected as the “Spitzenkandidat” (main candidate) for the next general election. We aim to uncover the factors that lead to the downfall of some political leaders. Empirically, we utilize a novel database comprising over 269 leaders from 47 political parties across nine parliamentary democracies since 1950. These include Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Analytically, we draw on insights from previous studies on party leadership survival, incorporating variables such as electoral performance, office attainment, government participation, leadership competition, party division, and pre-electoral polling, among others. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we evaluate the causal weight of these covariates in explaining leadership replacement. Through this analytical framework, we aim to deepen our understanding of why parties decide to replace their leaders, the conditions under which these decisions occur, and why some leaders, against all odds, manage to survive even when their removal might seem intuitively inevitable.