Feelings about party leaders as a voter's heuristic – what happens when the leaders change? A note

Abstract

Recent analyses of voting at British general elections deploy a valence theory according to which electors evaluate each party's performance and policies and vote accordingly. Many voters, however, avoid at least some of the effort involved in assembling and assessing information about parties' policies and instead use heuristics such as their feelings about the party leaders as major determinants of their decisions. When party leaders are changed, therefore, differences in voters' feelings about predecessor and successor could lead to changes in party choice. That argument is tested for the 2015 and 2017 British general elections in England, between which all three largest parties changed their leader, with results entirely consistent with the argument. In addition, there were significant changes in feelings about the new party leaders during the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, and these too were linked to final voting choices in the expected directions.

How Do Populist Voters Rate Their Political Leaders? Comparing Citizen Assessments in Three Jurisdictions

“…Some insight into how scholars consider character and its perception by followers can be discerned in national election studies, such as the British Election Study (BES), which has been conducted since 1964. Comparing the 2015 and 2017 general elections, for example, the BES team probed how changing the party leader impacted how voters felt about the party (Johnston, Hartman, & Pattie, 2019). The BES study's core questionnaire focuses mainly on probing the likeability of leaders and does not engage the broader concept of character.…”