Partiledareffektens vara eller icke vara. En undersökning om partiledarskiftens effekt på policyförändringar

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to whether there is a relationship between change in political leadership and shift in parties’ policy position. Does the incentives for change become bigger when a new leader has been appointed? Earlier research find no connection between party leader change and shift in policy position. However, compared to earlier investigations, I test two hypotheses containing new variables which theoretically could increase the incentives for both leadership and policy position change. Therefore, my aim is to contribute to the research within this field by controlling for these variables that theoretically might change earlier non- existing relationship findings to an, in fact, existing relationship. I examine this through a quantitative method using the dataset from Fernandez-Vazquez and Somer-Topcu’s study from 2019. The following results, however, confirms the findings from earlier literature and contradicts my hypotheses. Noteworthy is that much of the results are unsatisfactory considering statistical significance which signals that we cannot discard the hypotheses from being true. The study gives us a potential indication about the marginal effects of party leader change on shifts in policy position.