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Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2026

Florence So Open the ORCID record for Florence So [Opens in a new window]
Florence So*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark
*
Address for correspondence: Florence So, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, DK‐8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Email: fso@ps.au.dk
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Abstract

Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties’ perceived unity as well as competence in the policy‐making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties’ performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties’ record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties’ electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties’ electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests’ timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes.

Keywords

perceived competence and election outcomesintraparty politicsgoverning versus opposition partiesparties and elections

Information

Type
Original Articles
Information
European Journal of Political Research , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 European Consortium for Political Research

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Footnotes

The dataset used in this paper and the Stata codes for the statistical analyses will be made available online upon publication.

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