Author: Anthony King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780198297918
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The conventional wisdom purveyed by the press and television and accepted as true by most politicians is that elections throughout the democratic world are personal clashes between individual presidential candidates and party leaders. Almost everyone assumes that election outcomes are frequently determined by the major candidates' personal characteristics. In the United States, Al Gore in 2000 came over as aloof and arrogant--and failed to win his expected victory. InGreat Britain, Tony Blair in 2001 came across as dynamic and personable--and won a second term. So personal charisma appears to yield electoral success.This study by eminent scholars on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Survey research conducted in recent decades indicates that relatively few voters are swayed by candidates personal characteristics. Far more important are voters' longstanding party loyalties, their views on issues, and their judgments of how well or badly presidents and parties have performed--or will perform--in office. The votesof even the few electors who are swayed by candidates' personalities usually cancel each other out.As a result, election outcomes are seldom decided by individual candidates' personal images. Occasionally, but not often. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton owed their election victories more to economics than to charm. At the end of World War II, the charismatic Winston Churchill lost the 1945 British general election; the colorless Clement Attlee won. Chancellor Helmut Kohl remained in power in Germany for a generation-but was neverpersonally popular. Russian voters reckoned that Boris Yeltsin could not hold his drink- but nevertheless elected him.The implications of the authors' analyses are profound. They suggest that modern democratic politics is not nearly as candidate-centered and personality-oriented as is often supposed. They also suggest that parties' policies and their performance in office usually count for far more than the men and women they choose as their leaders. Not least, the authors suggest that the efforts of political consultants, advertising agencies, and spindoctors are often misdirected.
Author: Anthony King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191522996
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
The conventional wisdom purveyed by the press and television and accepted as true by most politicians is that elections throughout the democratic world are personal clashes between individual presidential candidates and party leaders. Almost everyone assumes that election outcomes are frequently determined by the major candidates' personal characteristics. In the United States, Al Gore in 2000 came over as aloof and arrogantand failed to win his expected victory. In Great Britain, Tony Blair in 2001 came across as dynamic and personableand won a second term. So personal charisma appears to yield electoral success. This study by eminent scholars on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Survey research conducted in recent decades indicates that relatively few voters are swayed by candidates1 personal characteristics. Far more important are voters' longstanding party loyalties, their views on issues, and their judgments of how well or badly presidents and parties have performedor will performin office. The votes of even the few electors who are swayed by candidates' personalities usually cancel each other out. As a result, election outcomes are seldom decided by individual candidates' personal images. Occasionally, but not often. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton owed their election victories more to economics than to charm. At the end of World War II, the charismatic Winston Churchill lost the 1945 British general election; the colorless Clement Attlee won. Chancellor Helmut Kohl remained in power in Germany for a generation-but was never personally popular. Russian voters reckoned that Boris Yeltsin could not hold his drink- but nevertheless elected him. The implications of the authors' analyses are profound. They suggest that modern democratic politics is not nearly as candidate-centered and personality-oriented as is often supposed. They also suggest that parties' policies and their performance in office usually count for far more than the men and women they choose as their leaders. Not least, the authors suggest that the efforts of political consultants, advertising agencies, and spin doctors are often misdirected.
Author: Kees Aarts
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191612340
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Outcomes of legislative elections are typically reported in terms of party support: how many votes and seats were obtained by each party? But in fact voters are faced with three choices which must be folded into one. They must decide which party they prefer, but in so doing they must take account of the policies advocated by these parties and the leaders who will eventually have to enact them. This simple fact raises question about the relative weight of these considerations, and espeically the importance granted to the leaders. This issue has been largely neglected in the vast literature on voting behaviour.The dominant traditions in the study of voting behaviour focus on political parties and party identification; and on political issues and ideology, respectively. This volume uses election surveys over the past 50 years to systematically assesses the impact of political leaders on voting decisions in nine democracies (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States). It analyses issues such as the changes in political communication (particularly the rise of televized politics), and the relative importance accorded to political leaders in different types of political systems. It demonstrates how electoral systems and other political institutions have a discernible effect on the importance voters accord to actual political leaders. Contrary to popular wisdom, Political Leaders and Democratic Elections shows how unimportant the characteristics of political leaders, parties, and indeed the voters themselves actually are on voting patterns. The volume shows that voters tend to let themselves be guided by the leaders they like rather than being pushed away from those they dislike. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.
Author: Christopher H. Achen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888743
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.
Author: D. Garzia
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349669938
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Using an innovative framework for the study of voting behavior in parliamentary democracies, this book sheds new light on the ongoing personalization of politics. The analysis makes use of national election study data from Britain, Germany and The Netherlands and shows that party leaders can often be the difference between victory and defeat.
Author: Marina Costa Lobo
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199660123
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Personality Politics? 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 employs innovative methodologies to determine the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. Addressing such questions as 'Where do leaders effects come from?', 'In which institutional contexts are leader effects more important?' and, 'To which kinds of voters are leaders a more prominent factor for voting behaviour?', the authors seek to determine whether the roles leaders play enhances or damages the electoral process, and what impact this has on the quality of democracy in electoral democracies today.
Author: Archie Brown
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465080979
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
From one of the world's preeminent political historians, a magisterial study of political leadership around the world from the advent of parliamentary democracy to the age of Obama. All too frequently, leadership is reduced to a simple dichotomy: the strong versus the weak. Yet, there are myriad ways to exercise effective political leadership -- as well as different ways to fail. We blame our leaders for economic downfalls and praise them for vital social reforms, but rarely do we question what makes some leaders successful while others falter. In this magisterial and wide-ranging survey of political leadership over the past hundred years, renowned Oxford politics professor Archie Brown challenges the widespread belief that strong leaders -- meaning those who dominate their colleagues and the policy-making process -- are the most successful and admirable. In reality, only a minority of political leaders will truly make a lasting difference. Though we tend to dismiss more collegial styles of leadership as weak, it is often the most cooperative leaders who have the greatest impact. Drawing on extensive research and decades of political analysis and experience, Brown illuminates the achievements, failures and foibles of a broad array of twentieth century politicians. Whether speaking of redefining leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher, who expanded the limits of what was politically possible during their time in power, or the even rarer transformational leaders who played a decisive role in bringing about systemic change -- Charles de Gaulle, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela, among them -- Brown challenges our commonly held beliefs about political efficacy and strength. Overturning many of our assumptions about the twentieth century's most important figures, Brown's conclusions are both original and enlightening. The Myth of the Strong Leader compels us to reassess the leaders who have shaped our world - and to reconsider how we should choose and evaluate those who will lead us into the future.
Author: R. A. W. Rhodes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191645869
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 905
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Book Description
Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.
Author: Justin Fisher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317965531
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
The 2010 general election was the most eagerly awaited contest in Britain since 1997. With opinion polls showing a closing gap between the parties, the result was uncertain right up to polling day. In the end, the election was particularly noteworthy for three reasons. First of all, there were televised debates between leaders of the three largest parties. This idea has long been called for, but for a variety of reasons they had not occurred in Britain until 2010. Now they are here, they are almost certainly here to stay. Secondly, the election led to the end of thirteen years of Labour rule. Just as the 1964 and the 1997 elections had delivered the final blows to long-standing one party government, so 2010 did the same. What made 2010 particularly significant however was that, unlike 1964 or 1997, no single party assumed the reins of power. Thirdly, although the Conservatives ended up as the largest party by some margin, they were still some twenty seats short of a majority of just one. Not since the election of February 1974 had the result failed to produce a majority government in the Commons, and before that, we would have to go back to 1929 to find a similar outcome. This book features high quality and data-rich examinations of the election. It is intended for audiences who want to go beyond a simple description of the election towards an enhanced understanding of why the election turned out the way it did. This book was published as a special edition of Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties.
Author: Jeffrey E. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Although presidents may have a difficult time actually leading the public and Congress, voters still desire strong leadership from their commander in chief. In Presidential Leadership in Public Opinion, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that the perception of presidential leadership in American politics is affected not so much by what presidents accomplish but by whether voters think their president is a good leader. When assessing whether a president is a good leader, voters ask two questions: does the president represent me and the nation? And, is the president strong? Cohen shows that presidential interactions with Congress affect voter perceptions of presidential representation and strength. These perceptions have important implications for public attitudes about American politics. They affect presidential approval ratings, the performance of candidates in presidential elections, attitudes toward Congress, and trust in government. Perceptions of presidential leadership qualities have implications not only for the presidency but also for the larger political system.
