Are Party Leaders Becoming More Important in German Elections? Leader Effects on the Vote in Germany, 1961-1998

This paper explores the evolution of leader effects on the vote. The laboratory in which this is done is the German Federal Republic (after re-unification: West Germany), and the time horizon is roughly the last four decades. It is argued that leader effects on the vote have their place in a “realistic ” model of representative democracy, and that they are expected to increase due to processes of partisan dealignment and personalisation of politics. While earlier German research could not identify a secular increase in leader effects on vote choices, we do find some hints in this direction. Developments are not linear though, and dramatic events and the political actors on stage after 1983 seem to have reversed earlier trends to some degree. Methodological issues are also taken up. A strategy for the simultaneous analysis of vote choices in multi-party systems is proposed, and an ‘ideal ’ research design for the identifi-cation of leader effects on the vote is identified – if only at the very end of the paper. Political leaders, as we use the term, are contenders for central political office.1 They do not play much of a role in contemporary models of representative democracy. The Responsible Party Model does not even have them in its list of actors. On stage there are just parties an