If Winning Isn't Everything, Why Do They Keep Score? Consequences of Electoral Performance for Party Leaders

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 657-675

  Andrews, Josephine T ^a   Jackman, Robert W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69849131427     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340800032X     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Peter Woolstencroft, ‘Doing Politics Differently: The Conservative Party and the Campaign of 1993’, in Alan Frizzell, Jon H. Pammett and Anthony Westell, eds, The Canadian General Election of 1993 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), pp. 9-26, at p. 9.
2. Woolstencroft, ‘Doing Politics Differently’, p. 10.
3. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), and David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).
4. Joseph A. Schlesinger, Political Parties and the Winning of Office (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), chap. 1.
5. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, p. 26.
6. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
7. Harold Wilson, The New Britain: Labour's Plan (Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin, 1964).
8. Harold D. Clarke and Paul Whiteley, ‘Perceptions of Macroeconomic Performance, Government Support and Conservative Party Strategy in Britain, 1983-1987’, European Journal of Political Research, 46 (1997), 97-120.
9. Harold D. Clarke, Karl Ho and Marianne C. Stewart, ‘Major's Lesser (not Minor) Effects: Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support in Britain Since 1979’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 255-73.
10. David J. Lanoue and Barbara Headrick, ‘Prime Ministers, Parties, and the Public’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 58 (1994), 191-209.
11. Ian McAllister, ‘Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders and Government Popularity in Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 38 (2003), 259-77.
12. See especially Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph M. Siverson, ‘War and the Survival of Political Leaders:AComparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 841-55; and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
13. Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, ‘War and the Survival of Political Leaders’, p. 842.
14. See, for example, Sheila M. Puffer and Joseph B. Weintrop, ‘Corporate Performance and CEO Turnover: The Role of Performance Expectations’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36 (1991), 1-19; Kathleen A. Farrell and David A. Whidbee, ‘Monitoring by the Financial Press and Forced CEO Turnover’, Journal of Banking and Finance, 26 (2002), 249-76; Farrell and Whidbee, ‘Impact of Firm Performance on CEO Turnover and Replacement Decisions’, Journal of Accounting and Economics, 36 (2003), 165-96; and Ellen Engel, Rachel M. Hayes and Xue Wang, ‘CEO Turnover and Properties of Accounting Information’, Journal of Accounting and Economics, 36 (2003), 197-226.
15. See, for example, John L. Fizel and Micael P. D'Itri, ‘Managerial Efficiency, Managerial Succession, and Organizational Performance’, Managerial and Decision Economics, 18 (1997), 295-308; and Rick Audas, Stephen Dobson and John Goddard, ‘Organizational performance and Managerial Turnover’, Managerial and Decision Economics, 20 (1999), 305-18.
16. Engel, Hayes and Wang, ‘CEO Turnover and Properties of Accounting Information’.
17. Audas, Dobson and Goddard, ‘Organizational Performance and Managerial Turnover’.
18. Stated reasons like these for resignations should be interpreted with some caution, since leaders have an obvious incentive to characterize a resignation as voluntary rather than involuntary. See, e.g., Katie Hafner, ‘Canned phrases for making an exit’, New York Times, 23 December 2006.
19. For a similar observation, see James Adams, Michael Clark, Lawrence Ezrow and Garrett Glasgow, ‘Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion or to Past Election Results?’ British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 589-610, at p. 608.
20. See, for example, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier, ‘Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes’, Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), 183-219.
21. Janet Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford S. Jones, Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 47.
22. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones makes this point quite strongly, ‘As we have pointed out…there are few instances that we can think of where one would naturally prefer a parametric duration model over a Cox-type event history model for most kinds of social science applications’ (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, p. 66).
23. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones define the hazard rate as ‘a conditional failure rate [that,] unlike the density function or the survivor function, describes the risk a unit incurs of having a spell or duration end in some period Y conditional on its history’ (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, p. 15).
24. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, p. 48.
25. See Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, p. 60.
26. For this test, we followed the recommendations outlined in the manual for STATA 8, pp. 128-31.
27. See, for example, Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, ‘Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes’.