Personality Politics?: The Role of Leader Evaluations in Democratic Elections
Marina Costa Lobo and John Curtice
Abstract
This book assesses the role that voters’ perceptions and evaluations of leaders play in democratic elections. The book presents evidence from an array of countries with diverse historical and institutional contexts and employ innovative methodologies in order to assess the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. The book aims to answer the fundamental question about leader effects in old and new democracies: namely to what extent they are a sign of a new, more rational, relationship between the electorate and the political realm, or whether they symbolize the de-basing of politics in t ... More
This book assesses the role that voters’ perceptions and evaluations of leaders play in democratic elections. The book presents evidence from an array of countries with diverse historical and institutional contexts and employ innovative methodologies in order to assess the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. The book aims to answer the fundamental question about leader effects in old and new democracies: namely to what extent they are a sign of a new, more rational, relationship between the electorate and the political realm, or whether they symbolize the de-basing of politics in the contestation of elections. In so doing, we seek to move the goalposts of debate on leader effects from the question of magnitude to the question of contexts. Ultimately, the book hopes to determine whether the role leaders play enhances or damages the electoral process, and so it hopes to be able to contribute to the debate on the quality of democracy in electoral democracies today.
Keywords:
leader effects,
democratic elections,
voters
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199660124 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660124.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Marina Costa Lobo, editor
Social Sciences Institute of the University of Lisbon
John Curtice, editor
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
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