🔎 What This Study Asks

This paper seeks to explain why some party leaders remain in office through the end of their term while others depart early, beginning from the moment they are selected or re-selected. The focus is on which characteristics of the leadership race, alone or in combination with other conditions, favor re-selection rather than a more or less forced early exit.

🗂️ Scope and Evidence

• Investigated all leadership races (LRs) held by both larger and smaller parties in four Western European countries over the last three decades.
• Bridges the literatures on leadership selection and leadership survival to place selection-stage features in conversation with tenure outcomes.

🧪 How Turnover Is Analyzed

• Applies an original methodological approach for this literature: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).
• QCA is used to uncover asymmetrical, equifinal, and conjunctural causation by identifying combinations of conditions that lead to the two outcomes of interest: leadership re-selection at the end of the term, or departure from office before term end.

📌 Conditions Examined

The analysis focuses on five main conditions that may affect whether a leader is re-selected or departs, both individually and in combination:

• Incumbency: whether an outgoing leader is running for re-election
• Inclusiveness of the leadership race: how broad or narrow the selectorate is
• Large victory: low competitiveness in contested races or very high approval rates in coronations of a single candidate
• Government participation: whether the party was in government during the leader’s tenure
• Party electoral support: distinction between large mainstream parties and small niche/challenger parties

📈 What the Analysis Reveals

• Results emphasize that combinations of conditions—rather than single factors—shape leadership survival: different conjunctures can produce the same outcome (equifinality), and causes operate asymmetrically across outcomes.
• The QCA approach makes visible which configurations of incumbency, inclusiveness, victory margin, government status, and party size are associated with enduring leadership versus early departure.

💡 Why This Matters

• Connects selection-stage institutions and dynamics to leadership survival, offering a clearer account of when selection mechanisms help produce stable leadership and when they presage turnover.
• Demonstrates the value of configurational methods (QCA) for comparative party studies and provides a systematic cross-party, cross-country portrait of leadership persistence and collapse.