Replication Data for \"Hard Acts to Follow: Predecessor Effects on Party Leader Survival\"

In this article, using our original data on party leadership succession in 23 parliamentary democracies, we investigate the determinants of a party leader's survival rate: how long he/she remains in office. Unlike previous studies, which focus on institutional settings of leadership selection or on situational (political, economic and international) conditions at the time of succession, we propose a perceptual theory of leadership survival, focusing on the expectations of party constituents (or indirectly, the voting public) who have the power to remove a leader. Specifically, we argue that they 'benchmark' their expectation of a current party leader's performance by comparing it against their memory of that leader's immediate predecessor. Empirically, we show that party leaders who succeeded a (very) long-serving party leader and/or a leader who had also been the head of government experience lower longevity than others, making these types of predecessor 'hard acts to follow'.本文依托我们针对23个议会制民主国家政党领袖继任事件的原始数据，探讨了政党领袖任期留存率——即其在职时长——的核心决定因素。与既往研究多聚焦于领袖遴选的制度环境，或是继任发生时的政治、经济与国际等情境性条件不同，本文提出了一套关于政党领袖任期留存的感知理论，核心关注拥有罢免领袖权力的政党选民（或间接而言的投票公众）的预期。具体而言，本文主张，这些主体会将自身对现任政党领袖的表现预期，与自身对该领袖的直接前任的记忆进行对标，以此锚定自身的评价基准。实证层面，本文证实：继任了（极）长期任职政党领袖，或是继任了同时曾担任政府首脑的政党领袖的在职者，其任期时长相较于其他领袖更短，这使得此类前任领袖成为了继任者难以效仿的标杆。