Abstract
The trend towards the ‘presidentialisation’ of elections and governance has resulted in an upsurge in academic research on political leaders and elites in general. As part of this development, two new edited volumes have been published and each addresses key questions about the acquisition and maintenance of power.
How Power Changes Hands consists of a series of case studies and comparisons of elite transitions and successions, primarily in political parties and governmental positions (for example, prime ministers and cabinet ministers), but with chapters on bureaucracy and bicameralism too. Transitions entail changes in the party or coalition in government, especially after elections, with multiple changes of elite personnel occurring simultaneously. Successions are more limited changes of individuals holding posts, whether in party-leadership changes or ministerial reshuffles (pp. 2–6).
From the perspective of party specialists, the most interesting chapters are those by: Cross and Blais on leader-eviction mechanisms, Laing and ’t Hart on seeking and keeping hold of the party leadership, and Errington on opposition leaders. (There are numerous other interesting chapters too, most notably Dowding and McLeay’s on ministerial turnover.) Cross and Blais report some of their findings from a larger research project on leadership elections in Westminster democracies. They show that parties have increasingly adopted eviction mechanisms for the purposes of accountability, but that leaders are least secure when parliamentary parties exercise this power of removal because it can be carried out easier and quicker. Laing and ’t Hart show that while ‘loyalists’ (in relation to the previous incumbent) are the most common type of leadership successor, it is ‘reformers’ and ‘revolutionaries’ – those who are critical of their predecessors’ platforms – who survive longer and enjoy more electoral success. Errington compares two Australian and two British prime ministers who developed their styles while in opposition. He notes that ‘[p]romising policy transformation from opposition … was out of fashion in Westminster systems by the mid-1990s’ (p. 62). This fits with arguments about the greater contemporary focus on leaders’ character and personality traits during elections.
How Power Changes Hands offers a useful overview of its subject matter. The chapters are thought-provoking, well-written and address important questions. If there were one (small) criticism to make, it would be that the range of institutions under consideration is rather broad and that can sometimes affect the overall cohesion of the volume. On the other hand, the comparative element is strong and geographically interesting. Most of the contributors are based in Australian universities and consequently many of the chapters involve discussions of Australian (and New Zealand) cases, usually in comparison with other countries. Australasian politics tend to be overlooked in a lot of comparative analyses of advanced democracies, where the emphasis is on the US and Western Europe. It is to be hoped that this volume might bring Australia and New Zealand to the attention of more political scientists.
Leaders of the Opposition is another edited volume but focused on Britain. It contains separate chapters on 16 opposition leaders since 1945 and a good concluding chapter by Timothy Heppell. Rather than offering potted histories, the authors of each chapter analyse leaders in terms of four criteria: party management, policy-making, political communication and ‘emotional intelligence’. This structure facilitates comparison of different leaders. Emotional intelligence has probably become more important in the television era, while policy-making has perhaps declined. Communication and party management remain crucial, however.
The demands put on an opposition leader are different from those facing a prime minister. The latter must constantly take decisions that have immediate impact and importance on domestic policy or world events. In contrast, opposition leaders can only talk. That is one reason why political communication skills are so important in opposition: a leader has to convince voters that s/he could do things better than the prime minister.
The need for internal unity ensures that party management looms large for an opposition leader. However, it is clear from the chapters in this book that the demands of party management have varied considerably between different opposition leaders. Some have had to hold together warring factions, in the way of Foot and Hague, but what emerges is that leaders who paper over the cracks of internal divisions are rarely successful. Other leaders decided to confront rival factions in the manner of Gaitskell and Kinnock. The latter is an interesting case because, although voters rarely saw him as a credible prime minister-in-waiting, he was one of the few people who could have led Labour in the 1980s. He came from the party’s dominant left-wing, but took on and defeated the far-left. It was a prerequisite for making Labour electable again, although Kinnock was never fully trusted by the electorate and it was Blair who was the eventual beneficiary.
In his concluding chapter, Heppell observes how the role of opposition leader has changed. The rise of valence politics, with its emphasis on competence, has brought leaders to the fore as the personal embodiments of their parties. Leaders have become noticeably younger and less experienced, as parties look to signal to voters their freshness. They have been given more power to achieve party goals through the process of intra-party centralisation. However, the other side of the coin is a reduced tolerance of electoral failure: if voters do not warm to an opposition leader, their parties will be more ruthless in dispatching him/her.
This volume makes a good attempt to assess the post of opposition leader and its holders, and the criteria it deploys are reasonable ones. But it would have been interesting to know why post-war British opposition leaders have not, on the whole, been particularly impressive. Tim Bale is probably right that Cameron was one of the best (p. 222), but given that he failed to win the 2010 election outright, it does suggest a general ineffectiveness to the post. On the other hand, great prime ministers need not have excelled in opposition: Thatcher dominated in high office but she was a mediocre opposition leader. This curiosity might also have been developed more fully in Leaders of the Opposition. However, those are minor criticisms of what is, overall, a lucid and fascinating volume.