Parties and their Leaders: Does it matter how they match? The German General Elections 2009 in comparison

• Autores: Aiko Wagner, Bernhard Wessels
• Localización: Electoral Studies: An international Journal, ISSN 0261-3794, Vol. 31, Nº. 1, 2012, págs. 72-82
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The ‘personalization of politics’ hypothesis assumes that personalization takes place in election campaigns, in the mass-media, and in the calculus of voting. We claim that the distinction between person/leader and organization implicitly assumed by the personalization hypothesis does not capture how voters observe politics. In contrast, our hypothesis is that evaluation criteria regarding parties and leaders are not in competition but reinforcing. This hypothesis is investigated by looking at the relevance of party and leader evaluations for vote choice in the German Federal Elections in 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2009. The results show that party evaluation matter more than leader evaluation and, more importantly, a match of parties and their leaders with regard to general evaluations determine vote choice as good as single evaluations together.