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Intra-party democracy, political performance and the survival of party leaders

Political parties are central to modern democracy and the selection of their leaders is one of the most crucial decisions for any political party to make. Yet, the analysis of party leadership survival is still in its infancy. The pioneering research has been confined to few countries and decades and has focused exclusively on performance-related explanations. While performance is an obvious determinant of party leader survival, generations of research on party organizations suggest that intra-party factors should matter, too. We argue that, while the political performance of a party leader (winning elections, securing government participation) is important, intra-party support and the rules of leadership selection add substantively to our understanding of why party leaders survive or fall. We test these expectations on a new dataset covering all leaders of Austrian parties between 1945 and 2011. The results of our statistical analysis support our claim and show that intra-party factors have a considerable impact on party leader survival.