The Conservative Party Leadership Transition from Theresa May to Boris Johnson: Party Popularity and Leadership Satisfaction

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the Conservative Party leadership transition from Theresa May to Boris Johnson using the work of Leonard P. Stark (1996) on the impact of changing the party leader. We adapt the Stark framework for determining impact and using public opinion data on party popularity and leadership satisfaction. We place the transition from May to Johnson in a historical context by comparing it to the impact of leadership transitions within the Conservative Party since the inception of leadership democracy in 1965.

KEYWORDS:

• Prime Ministers
• Conservative Party
• Boris Johnson
• leadership elections
• leadership effects

Introduction

This paper examines the transition of the leadership of the Conservative Party from Theresa May to Boris Johnson. The rationale for doing so stems from the outcome of the General Election of 2019, which provided the Conservative Party with a parliamentary majority above 25 for the first time since the General Election of 1987, when they secured a three-figure majority. The majority that Johnson secured for the Conservative Party, at 80, would represent a significant improvement upon the majority of 21 at the General Election of 1992 or the majority of 12 at the General Election of 2015, and of course, they only secured access to power after the General Election of 2010 via a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; and they governed as a minority administration after the General Election of 2017, albeit with the backing of a confidence and supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party (Cowley & Kavanagh, 2018; Cutts, Goodwin, Heath, & Surridge, 2020).

For the Conservatives to secure such a large parliamentary majority represented a significant achievement, or conundrum, for the following reasons. First, they were seeking re-election to government when they had already occupied power for approaching a decade.¹ Second, over that decade their attempts to rebalance the economy in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008 – i.e., the politics of austerity – had involved significant cuts to public services leading to growing poverty and inequality, which could be expected to undermine their electoral appeal (Clarke, Kellner, Stewart, Twyman, & Whiteley, 2016). Third, if their economic record had caused divisions then so had their approach to membership of the European Union. The rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party – who went from 603,298 votes at the General Election in 2005 to 3,881,129 votes at the General Elections of 2015 – and their relentless focus on freedom of movement and immigration, had represented an electoral threat to the Conservatives on the outer right (Goodwin & Milazzo, 2015). The strategy of former Prime Minister, David Cameron, to neutralise that threat by seeking reform to the terms of European Union membership and validating this via an in/out referendum (in June 2016), backfired spectacularly (Clarke, Goodwin, & Whiteley, 2017). The inability of his successors, May and then Johnson, to construct terms of withdrawal from the European Union that were acceptable to Parliament, would then lead to political (and governmental) paralysis (Adam, 2020). A long-serving party of government seeking re-election on the back of austerity fatigue and the Brexit crisis hardly amounted to the traditional recipe for election success.

That the Conservative Party was able to secure a new mandate with such a clear majority was presented as a personal triumph for Johnson. This assertion seems justifiable when we consider the academic literature on leadership effects and how political parties have come to place a stronger emphasis on the appeal of their leaders² (Denver, 2005). With this contributing to personality-driven election campaigning, parties have increasingly branded themselves around their leaders, who have become an important heuristic aid or informational short cut for voters with limited knowledge or interest in policy (Clarke, Sanders, Stewart, & Whiteley, 2004, 2009). The personalisation of political coverage has become even more pronounced as leadership debates, conducted in various formats, have come to dominate the campaigning period since their introduction in the General Election campaign of 2010 (Allen, Bara, & Bartle, 2013, 2017; Langer, 2011). That relative perceptions of leadership appeal can act as an aid or hindrance to parties seeking (re)election has been established in numerous academic studies on General Elections in recent decades (see Stewart & Clarke, 1992; Clarke & Stewart, 1995; Clarke, Ho, & Stewart, 2000; Stevens, Karp, & Hodgson, 2011; Clarke, Sanders, Stewart, & Whiteley, 2009; Whiteley, Clarke, Sanders, & Stewart, 2013; Clarke et al., 2016).³

However, academic research on leadership impacts is predominantly focused around General Election campaigns. In comparison, academic research on leadership impacts, which flow from a change in the party leadership, is less well developed within the studies of British political parties. Part of the reason why this might be the case is that within the two main parties the historical pattern has been that changes in the party leadership do not tend to coincide with the timing of General Election campaigns. In the 21 General Elections since the Second World War on every occasion the incumbent Labour Party leader has been in post for over a year. The shortest tenure when facing the electorate was that of Harold Wilson, at one year and eight months, and he only came to the leadership as a consequence of the death of Hugh Gaitskell (Heppell, 2010). By comparison, the Conservatives have had only five party leaders who have faced the voters inside the first year of their leadership tenure. In opposition, Edward Heath had only been in post for eight months at the time of the General Election of 1966, and four incumbent Conservative Prime Ministers have sought a new mandate inside the first year of their leadership tenure: Anthony Eden (just under two months) at the time of the 1955 General Election; Alec Douglas-Home (one day off a full year) at the time of the 1964 General Election; May (just short of nine months) at the time of the 2017 General Election; and, of course, Johnson who choose to face the electorate within five months of entering Downing Street (on ‘takeover’ Prime Ministers, see Worthy, 2016).

To address the relative neglect of initial leadership impacts upon acquiring the party leadership, this paper embraces and updates the work on Leonard Stark (1996). Our paper is subdivided into the following sections. First, we identify how the issue of impact and leadership change has been overlooked within the academic literature on party leadership elections within British politics. Second, we explain (and modify) the Stark framework for assessing impact, identifying how it will be based upon utilising public opinion data at set points (at three and six months respectively) in relation to party popularity and leadership satisfaction. Third, we will then present the historical evidence in relation to the two themes and we will compare the findings for Johnson against those initial impacts made in Conservative Party leadership tenures since they introduced internal democracy for leadership selections in 1965.

Leadership Elections: The Stark Criteria of Acceptability, Electability and Competence

Within the academic research on political leadership and political parties one of the growing areas of interest has been leadership selection. Most of this academic research tends to be single country focused and an area of particular growth has been within studies on British political parties⁴ (Denham, Dorey, & Roe-Crines, 2020; Heppell, 2008b; 2010; Punnett, 1992; Quinn, 2012; Stark, 1996). Academics involved in party leadership selection within the British Conservative Party have tended to position their research within the following two traditions.

First, there are case study profiles of individual party leadership elections. Studies within this tradition tend to focus on identifying the candidates and exploring their strengths and weaknesses; analysing the campaigning period and then they offer explanations as to who won and why (see Alderman & Carter, 1991, 2002; Alderman, 1996, 1998; Denham & Dorey, 2006; Quinn, 2019; see also Heppell, 2008b; Denham & O’Hara, 2008). Supporting these qualitative accounts that explain who won and why, are quantitative appraisals, that consider the possible social, political and ideological explanations as to why parliamentarians voted for the candidates that they did (see Cowley & Garry, 1998; Cowley & Bailey, 2000; Heppell & Hill, 2008, 2009, 2010; Jeffery, Heppell, Hayton, & Crines, 2018).

Second, whereas this first body of research tends to be agency orientated and examines those seeking the party leadership, there is an alternative body of research which takes a more structural perspective and examines the importance of leadership selection rules.⁵ This body of research identifies how party leadership rules change and why, but also examines the significance of these changes (Alderman, 1999; McSweeney, 1999; Quinn, 2005) and it identifies the ease (or otherwise) with which a Conservative Party leader can be evicted from the leadership (McAnulla, 2010).

The Stark criteria are oft-cited within the explanations as to who won and why (Denham et al., 2020; Heppell, 2008b, 2010; Quinn, 2012). In constructing his criteria, Stark was influenced by the work of Sjoblom, who had identified that within parliamentary systems, parties were incentivised to pursue the following three strategic goals: to remain united, to win elections, and to implement policy (Sjoblom, 1968). From this Stark, using party leadership elections in British politics between 1963 and 1994 as his evidence, argued that in party leadership elections, voters, be they parliamentarians or members, should be motivated by these three strategic needs: acceptability; electability; and competence. The order of importance within the Stark criteria is as follows: first, select the candidate who can best unite the party (so first eliminate the most divisive candidate); then second, select the most electorally attractive candidates (so then eliminate electorally unappealing candidate), and then finally, from what remains, select the candidate who is most likely to offer political competence – i.e., who would make the best Prime Minister (Stark, 1996, pp. 125–6). The validity of the Stark criteria for explaining outcomes in the period after 1997 within British political parties has been confirmed by the work of Quinn (2012), although the election of Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 certainly represented a challenge to the validity of the Stark criteria (see Quinn, 2016; Dorey and Denham, 2016; Crines, Jeffery, & Heppell, 2018; Heppell & McMeeking, 2020).

On the relationship between these criteria, Murr (2015) has suggested that a correlation exists between parliamentary mandates (the margin of victory or acceptability) and subsequent electoral success. On voting motivation, he has argued that parliamentarians are the best placed (not members) to assess the Prime Ministerial capability of the candidates (Stark criteria three); and on Stark criteria two, Murr has argued that parliamentarians are incentivised to select the most electorally appealing candidate – i.e., as career politicians, they are motivated by the need to secure re-election and potentially ministerial office. On the basis that a large support base amongst parliamentarians is a signifier of unity (Stark criteria one) Murr argues that party leaders with larger margins of preference might be more electorally successful. Tracking parliamentary voting behaviour in General Elections since 1966, he identified that up 2010, of the two main parties, the party leader with the largest margin of preference at the parliamentary level had led their party to electoral success on ten occasions and had lost only twice (1970 and 1992) (Murr, 2015). When we apply this to the General Elections of 2015, 2017 and 2019 the respective Conservative Party leaders in each General Election – Cameron, May and Johnson – had a larger margin of preference amongst their fellow parliamentarians than the Labour Party leaders – Miliband and Corbyn.

Leadership Transitions: The Stark Impact Criteria

What emerges from profiling the academic literature on the Conservative Party leadership elections is the overemphasis on how and why individuals are selected (and the importance of the rules deployed for selecting them) and the underemphasis on their initial impact (positive or negative) in the months after the leadership transition. With this in mind, it is worth reassessing the other set of criteria advanced by Stark in 1996 on leadership transition impacts. In most occasions, parties are asked to participate in leadership elections to address a political problem – i.e., either they have been defeated in a General Election and the incumbent has resigned, or the insistence of the incumbent remaining in post threatens the electoral prospects of the party for the future. That being the case parties change their leadership with an expectation that a new party leader will be able to make a positive impact.

Although leadership transitions represent an underdeveloped aspect of the academic literature within British politics, it is a more developed aspect of the comparative academic literature. On one level leadership transitions could be seen almost as a mechanistic effect – i.e., losing elections and losing office typically lead to party leaders being replaced (Andrews & Jackman, 2008; Ennser-Jedenastik & Schumacher, 2020; ‘t Hart & Uhr, 2011). On whether leadership transitions are beneficial, however, academics disagree. On the one hand there are studies which suggest that leadership transitions can be problematic for parties, as they expose the ideological divisions which exist within the party, thus potentially weakening their electoral appeal (Bynander & ‘t Hart, 2007, 2008; Horiuchi, Laing, & t’Hart, 2015; Pedersen & Schumacher, 2015). On the other hand, there is an emerging body of academic literature that suggests that leadership change can be beneficial.⁶ It can aid voter understanding of parties – i.e., leadership elections can focus attention on parties and can help re-educate voters about party positioning. Not only can a change in party leader lower voter confusion about where parties might stand on a particularly policy issue, but a new party leader with a very clear position on a contentious policy issue can actually increase voter understanding of a party, which can in turn improve their credibility in the eyes of voters and thus aid their electoral prospects (see Somer-Topcu, 2017; Fernandez-Vasquez & Somer-Topcu, 2019).

Within the limited academic analysis on the impact of leadership transitions in British politics, both Punnett (1992:, p. 122) and Brown (1992, p. 526), who examined the transitions from Michael Foot to Neil Kinnock in the Labour Party, and from Margaret Thatcher to John Major within the Conservatives respectively, concluded that these provided evidence of the benefits to their parties of change. However, these were isolated case studies, and as a consequence, in his classic study on leadership selection Stark (1996) advanced a set of criteria to measure leadership transition impact. He argued that three measures of impact could be considered – i.e., first, the evidence of a change in the overall standing of the party in terms of projected vote share post-leadership change; second, the evidence of a change in the standing of the new leader in terms of voter satisfaction ratings as compared to the old leader; and, third, the evidence of change in terms of the unity rating for the party post-leadership change. Stark did his measurements from opinion polling data from one month before the leadership change and one month after. From this Stark identified that there was evidence of what he called an ‘empirical impact’ if there was an eight-percentage point shift, pre- to post-leadership change, within each of the three indices (i.e., outside the margin of error) (Stark, 1996, p. 142).

When analysing each of the leadership elections within British politics between 1963 and 1994, Stark (1996, pp. 161–2) reached the following conclusions. First, when considering the Labour Party leadership elections of 1963, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1988, 1992 and 1994, Stark concluded that three of those seven contests involved no empirical impact; one had a negative impact; one was mixed in terms of impact indicators; and two registered a clearly positive empirical impact. Second, whereas the evidence vis-à-vis the Labour Party is not overwhelming in terms of impacts, a far clearer picture emerges when considering the five Conservative Party leadership contests under consideration between 1965 and 1994. Stark identified how four out of five contests had a positive empirical impact, with one having no observable impact (Stark, 1996, p. 161). From these findings Stark concluded that ‘leadership contests are far more likely to improve a party's fortunes than damage them’, with leadership transitions ‘far more likely to have positive than negative impacts’ (Stark, 1996, p. 142, 162).

Whilst academics researching party leadership elections within British politics have been willing to engage with the Stark criteria on electability, acceptability and competence – see Heppell, 2008b, 2010; Quinn, 2012; Denham et al., 2020 – they have chosen not to embrace and extend the Stark criteria on measuring the impact of leadership change.

Both of the Stark criteria – on first, electability, acceptability and competence; and, second, on impact – carry with them challenges with regard to measurability. On making credible judgements on electability, acceptability and competence, Quinn (2019) has validated the use of the Stark criteria by relying on public opinion data (as opposed to subjective judgements) on the respective candidates for the leadership. Relying on opinion polling data for analysing leadership transitions carries with it debates about cause and effect – i.e., there is a need to recognise that shifts in terms of overall party popularity and shifts in perceptions of internal unity might be influenced by factors external to the change of leader as well as the change of leader itself (with this being less of a concern with regard to leadership satisfaction) (Stark, 1996, p. 226). Before proceeding with our updated analysis of Stark's ‘empirical impact’ framework we offer the following acknowledgement: we accept that shifts in public opinion towards political parties after a change in their party leader will not be solely caused by the change in party leader, but it would be erroneous to suggest that it is not an important influence, especially from the views of representatives, members, activists, journalists and voters. Or, to put in another way, why do parties attribute so much attention to debating changing the party leader if their impact is anything other than significant to their electoral prospects (Quinn, 2010, pp. 101–2).

We will modify the Stark criteria on leadership transition and impacts in the following two key ways. First, whereas Stark measured impact by three themes – party popularity; leadership satisfaction and party unity, our modified appraisal we will focus on the first two of these leadership transitional impacts – i.e., party popularity and leadership satisfaction – rather than considering party unity. We have made this adjustment primarily due to the difficulty in finding consistent opinion polling data on party unity in relation to the time period of leadership transitions within the Conservative Party.

Second, whereas Stark measured at one-month after from the leadership transition to establish the evidence of ‘empirical impact’ we have chosen to stretch the measurement to consider the evidence at intervals of three and six months after the change in leadership. The reason why we advocate a longer-term assessment than one month is because new leaders may secure an initial surge in assessments as a new face (at one month) but then subside thereafter. For example, after one month in the party leadership (in mid-1965) Edward Heath secured a 64 percent satisfaction ranking amongst voters and then fell 49 and 43 percent after three and six months respectively. In a similar case, Margaret Thatcher made a very positive one-month impact, hitting a 60 percent satisfaction ranking, before dipping to a 43 percent satisfaction rating at both the three and six-month intervals (King & Wybrow, 2001, pp. 206–7).

Conservative Party Leadership Transitions 1965–2019: Party Popularity and Leadership Satisfaction

The Stark argument was that leadership transitions within British political parties tend to be ‘more beneficial than harmful’ (1996: 164) and our updated and amended findings for leadership transitions and in relation party popularity (Table 1) and leadership satisfaction (Table 2), show some evidence to support these assumptions. To provide a wider political context to the findings for the change in the leadership of the Conservative Party we have included, in brackets, the figures for the popularity of the Labour Party and leadership satisfaction rates for their incumbent leader at the time of the Conservatives changing their leader and at three and six month intervals.

Table 1. Leadership change and party popularity.

	Final opinion poll for incumbent		Change	Three months	Six months	‘Empirical’ impact
1965	Home:	46%	Heath:	41%	42%	−5%	−4%
	[Wilson:	45%		49%	47%	+4%	+2]
1975	Heath:	34%	Thatcher:	43%	43%	+9%	+9%
	[Wilson:	48%		45%	40%	−3%	−8%]
1990	Thatcher:	31%	Major:	43%	39%	+12%	+8%
	[Kinnock:	46%		41%	34%	−5%	−12%]
1997	Major:	23%	Hague:	26%	21%	+3%	−1%
	[Blair:	59%		58%	63%	−1%	+4%]
2001	Hague:	27%	Duncan Smith:	25%	28%	−2%	+1%
	[Blair:	53%		56%	47%	+3%	−6%]
2003	Duncan Smith:	31%	Howard:	31%	35%	–	+4%
	[Blair:	40%		40%	35%	–	−5%]
2005	Howard:	32%	Cameron:	35%	41%	+3%	+9%
	[Blair:	42%		38%	31%	−4%	−11%]
2016	Cameron:	36%	May:	40%	40%	+4%	+4%
	[Corbyn:	35%		34%	29%	−1%	−6%]
2019	May:	25%	Johnson:	44%	47%	+19%	+21%
	[Corbyn	24%		28%	30%	+4	+6%]

Source: King & Wybrow, 2001, p. 9, 12, 17, 19–20; Ipsos-Mori, 2020a, 2020b.

Table 2. Leadership change and leadership satisfaction.

	Final opinion poll for incumbent*		Change	Three months	Six months	‘empirical’impact
1965	Home:	32%	Heath:	49%	43%	+17%	+11%
	[Wilson:	51%		61%	65%	+10%	+14%]
1975	Heath:	29%	Thatcher:	41%	37%	+12%	+8%
	[Wilson:	47%		40%	45%	−7%	−2%]
1990	Thatcher:	29%	Major:	58%	53%	+29%	+24%
	[Kinnock:	47%		41%	36%	−6%	−11%]
1997	Major:	33%	Hague:	39%	24%	+6%	−9%
	[Blair:	82%		83%	74%	+1%	−8%]
2001	Hague:	23%	Duncan Smith:	25%	26%	+2%	+3%
	[Blair:	49%		51%	46%	−2%	−3%]
2003	Duncan Smith:	22%	Howard:	30%	28%	+8%	+6%
	[Blair:	31%		32%	31%	+1%	-%]
2005	Howard:	25%	Cameron:	32%	32%	+7%	+7%
	[Blair:	39%		31%	32%	−8%	−7%]
2016	Cameron:	35%	May:	48%	45%	+13%	+10%
	[Corbyn:	27%		31%	26%	+4%	−1%]
2019	May:	25%	Johnson:	46%	43%	+21%	+18%
	[Corbyn	17%		15%	19%	−2%	+2%]

*Figures represent the percentage of voters expressing satisfaction.

Source: King & Wybrow, 2001, pp. 187–188, 190; 196–197, 205–208; Ipsos-Mori, 2020c; Opinium, 2020.

First, we considered the impact in terms of changes in party popularity. The nine leadership transitions that the Conservative Party have engaged in since the inception of internal democracy for electing their leaders show a trend towards an improvement in terms of voting intentions, with the 1965 transition from Home to Heath a significant outlier. The improving position of the Conservatives tends to run parallel to the change in projected Labour vote – i.e., six out of the nine leadership transitions see the Conservative projected vote go up at the six-month interval and the Labour projected vote go down. At the three-month interval, six out of nine have resulted in an improving opinion polling position for the Conservatives; and at the six-month internal, seven out of nine record an opinion polling improvement. We describe the Stark empirical impact claim as being in part sustained, however, for the following reason. It is true that the trend is towards an improving position vis-à-vis the electorate in the post-leadership transition period. However, if we apply the empirical impact as only counting if an 8 percent change is registered – as Stark specified that we should – then for the three-month interval only the 1975, 1990 and 2019 leadership transitions pass the Stark threshold.

By far the most significant increase of all of the nine transitions is that from May to Johnson. Although we have to acknowledge that the base that Johnson inherited from May was low (at 25 percent) the increase that was recorded was significant in historical terms – the increase for the Conservatives at three months was +19 percent and at six months that it was at +21. If we chose not to rely on the opinion polling data from just before May stepped down then of course the impact would be even more pronounced. If we relied on the return for the Conservatives in the May 2019 European Parliamentary Elections, when the Conservatives came fifth on nine percent of the vote (Cutts, Goodwin, Heath, & Milazzo, 2019) then we would see a +36 percent increase in their support by the time of the General Election of December 2019 (Cutts et al., 2020).

Second, for Stark the evidence of an empirical impact can also, in part, be measured in terms of leadership satisfaction for the new Conservative leader. In all nine leadership transitions there is evidence of a positive impact at the three-month point of analysis. Of these six can be said to meet the Stark threshold for ‘empirical impact’ – i.e., the increase in levels of voter satisfaction for the new party leader are above eight percent relative to the last satisfaction rating for the previous party leader. At the six-month point of comparison one of the new leaders, William Hague, was already registering a negative impact, but of the remaining eight only five of them pass the Stark ‘empirical impact’ threshold of an eight-percentage point increase. The most significant impact registered relates to the transition from Thatcher to Major, with Major being regarded well by 29 percent more voters at three months than Thatcher; and by 24 percent more at six months, thus adding validity to the short-term sense of a Major effect in the initial post-Thatcher era (Brown, 1992). In terms of change, Johnson provides the next more substantive impact in terms with a 21 percent higher satisfaction rating at three months than his predecessor, May, who admittedly by the time of her exit had seen her political authority collapse (Seldon & Newell, 2019).

In terms of how this relates to comparative leadership satisfaction rates we can note the following. At the six-month interval increased satisfaction with a new Conservative party leader runs parallel to a decline in satisfaction for the incumbent Labour leader. This pattern applied to six of the nine transitions. The exceptions were that Wilson increased his satisfaction ratings (as did Heath) in 1965; the satisfaction ratings for Blair were unmoved by the transition from Howard to Cameron; and Corbyn did see his ratings improve slightly, but the significance of this finding is undermined by the fact that his satisfaction ratings went from an incredibly low recording of 17 percent up to 19 percent.

By both the Stark criteria Johnson can be viewed as having had a significantly beneficial impact upon the Conservatives. Their projected vote increased by 19–21 percent within the first three to six months of his leadership tenure: a figure outstripping all other Conservative leaders and his leadership satisfaction ratings were a significant improvement upon those of May (+21) at three months and (+18) at six months. When comparing these to Labour Party leadership transitions as well, these impacts are matched only by the election of Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party. The last opinion polling finding under the leadership of John Smith had Labour projected to secure 46 percent of the vote, and the 3-month and 6-month post-Blair figures were projecting at 56 percent (+11 percent) and 62 percent (+16) (King & Wybrow, 2001, p. 18). When it comes to leadership satisfaction, however, the Blair impact is less pronounced – Smith had a 49 percent satisfaction rating in May 1994 and the three and six month impacts for Blair were +3 (at 52 percent) and then +7 (at 56 percent) (King & Wybrow, 2001, p. 217).

However, it is worth noting that the Stark criteria is based upon opinion polling data that reports ‘the number of people who are satisfied with the performance of a party's leader’ (Stark, 1996, p. 142). It might be useful to turn the Stark criteria around and consider the evidence of dissatisfaction in relation to leadership transitions. We would expect that the levels of dissatisfaction with incumbent party leaders, especially long-serving party leaders like Heath, Thatcher and Cameron, might be very high and would expect that the new party leaders will secure significantly lower dissatisfaction ratings in the initial three-month period with those increasing again at six months. As Table 3 demonstrates, a new party leader does lead to a significant reduction in dissatisfaction ratings, (comfortably surpassing the eight percent indicator of ‘impact’ that Stark had specified in all but one case), with regard to the party leadership with the removal of Thatcher and selection of Major being the most significant leadership transition, and the May to Johnson leadership transition being the second most significant in terms of positive impacts. When observing these impacts vis-à-vis leadership satisfaction it is worth noting that the trend over the last 50 years is towards lower levels of voter satisfaction with Prime Ministers and Leaders of the Opposition (Denver & Garnett, 2012).

Table 3. Leadership change and leadership dissatisfaction.

	Final opinion poll for incumbent*		Change	Three months	Six months	‘Empirical’ impact
1965	Home:	46%	Heath:	15%	21%	−31%	−25%
	[Wilson:	35%		29%	25%	−6	−10%]
1975	Heath:	53%	Thatcher:	25%	40%	−28%	−13%
	[Wilson	42%		49%	47%	+7%	+5]
1990	Thatcher:	66%	Major:	21%	32%	−45%	−34%
	[Kinnock:	40%		50%	54%	+10%	+14%]
1997	Major:	60%	Hague:	41%	60%	−19%	–%
	[Blair:	10%		12%	22%	+2%	+12%]
2001	Hague:	54%	Duncan Smith:	22%	31%	−32%	−23%
	[Blair:	43%		39%	46%	−4%	+4%]
2003	Duncan Smith:	49%	Howard:	22%	30%	−27%	−19%
	[Blair:	60%		59%	61%	−1%	+1%]
2005	Howard:	45%	Cameron:	19%	28%	−26%	−17%
	[Blair:	51%		62%	60%	+11%	+9%]
2016	Cameron:	66%	May:	32%	39%	−34%	−27%
	[Corbyn	52%		55%	61%	+3%	+9%]
2019	May:	69%	Johnson:	44%	36%	−25%	−33%
	[Corbyn	75%		75%	59%	−0%	−16%]

*Figures represent the percentage of voters expressing dissatisfaction.

Source: King & Wybrow, 2001, pp. 195–197, 206–208; Ipsos-Mori, 2020c; Opinium, 2020.

As such these findings reaffirm the work of Stark on empirical impacts and his claim that leadership transitions can be beneficial to political parties. However, if the May to Johnson transition is hugely beneficial for the Conservatives in terms of party popularity and indicators vis-à-vis leadership satisfaction, then a slightly less positive impact is evident in terms of the percentage of voters who take a negative view of the new party leader. Johnson emerges as a highly divisive politician relative to other new leaders of the Conservative Party. His satisfaction rating at three months (at 46 percent) is relatively strong as compared to other new leaders, but he scores low in terms of voters having no opinion, and thus his 44 percent dissatisfaction rating represents the highest of all of the newly elected leaders of the Conservatives at the three-month interval.

That Johnson had such a high dissatisfaction ranking may be a reflection of the tumultuous circumstances surrounding his initial months as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. The parliamentary gridlock and governmental paralysis surrounding Brexit created a highly divisive and toxic political landscape, coming as it did after a near long programme of austerity. That Johnson should secure high levels of dissatisfaction was not just due his difficult inheritance. His initial months in office saw a succession of parliamentary defeats, the removal of the whip from twenty-one Conservative backbenchers determined to block a no deal Brexit, and a humiliating court ruling deeming that his plan to prorogue Parliament was illegal, all of which could have increased voter concerns about the competence and credibility of Johnson as Prime Minister.

However, whatever limitations this may have exposed with regard to Johnson, the gap between voters finding his leadership satisfactory and those who were dissatisfied remained positive – 46 percent were satisfied and 44 percent were dissatisfied. This was a significant improvement upon (a). the minus 44 percent rating that May had when she left office (with 25 percent satisfied and 69 percent dissatisfied in her leadership) and significantly better than (b). the minus 60 percent rating Corbyn had at the onset of the General Election campaign of 2019 (15 percent satisfied 75 percent dissatisfied). For all of his evident flaws Johnson was able to improve the leadership credibility that the Conservative Party had in the midst of the Brexit crisis whereas the Labour Party under Corbyn could not (Ridge-Newman, 2019). Although Corbyn's dissatisfaction rate did go down from 75 to 59 percent by January 2020 the relevance of this finding is less significant, given that this was after the General Election defeat of December 2019. This was not consistent with the general trend, however, which was a change in the leaders of the Conservatives led to lower dissatisfaction ratings vis-à-vis their leader, and higher dissatisfaction ratings for the incumbent Labour leader in seven out of the nine leadership transitions (at the six-month interval).

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to consider the importance of leadership transitions to British political parties using the Conservative Party and the transition from May to Johnson as a case study. The rationale for doing was as follows. Although an extensive academic literature on leadership elections has emerged within British political science in recent decades, this has been predominantly geared towards analysing two issues. First, focusing in on political elites who campaign for the leadership and agency driven perspectives on who won and why; and, second, structurally driven perspectives which focus in on the leadership procedures and how they might influence who stands and won can win. This focus on individuals and rules has come at the neglect of asking what impacts new leaders when they first come to the leadership – i.e., whereas leadership elections embraced the Stark criteria on acceptability, electability and competence to drive future research on who won and why; they failed to develop the work of Stark on leadership transitions and impacts (Stark, 1996).

Given that Stark had identified that leadership transitions tend to be beneficial to parties it is something that scholars of British politics should have developed further. Our study utilised a modified version of the Stark criteria on leadership transitions and impacts, focusing on two themes – i.e., change in terms of party popularity post-leadership transition; and change in terms of leadership satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) post-leadership change. We stretched the timelines under consideration from the one-month stipulated under the Stark criteria and noted the impacts at three months and six months. Then in order to place the evidence that we would find in relation to the May to Johnson transition into some form of historical context, we complied data to cover the eight previous leadership transitions that have occurred within the Conservative Party since the inception of internal democracy in 1965.

The Stark argument – i.e., that leadership transitions can be positive experiences for political parties (1996), as they can create what Brown described as a ‘honeymoon period’ (1992: 555) – is reaffirmed via our updated and modified appraisal of the opinion polling data on Conservative Party leadership transitions. We demonstrated the following. First, that the impact of the May to Johnson transition is more pronounced than any other previous Conservative Party leadership transition in terms of gains in party popularity. Second, that the May to Johnson transition created the second most significant increase in perceptions of leadership satisfaction when compared to all Conservative Party leadership transitions since 1965. Third, that the May to Johnson transition showed the divisiveness of Johnson as a political leader. Other new leaders of the Conservative Party leaders entered their role with low levels of dissatisfaction at the three- and six-month intervals, but Johnson had the highest dissatisfaction figures for a new party leader. All other new Conservative Party leaders had higher ‘don't knows’ amongst voters than Johnson secured in the initial months of their leadership tenure. These findings suggest that the selection of Johnson created greater ideological clarity in terms of the position of the Conservative Party on the seminal issue of the day – Brexit – than was being offered under May. Applying the assumptions on leadership transitions that have underpinned recent comparative scholarship – i.e., Somer-Topcu, 2017, and Fernandez-Vasquez & Somer-Topcu, 2019 – we can postulate that the May to Johnson transition is consistent with their findings that leadership transitions can be beneficial to parties if the new party leader reduces voter confusion about where the party stands on a central policy issue / ideological question.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Timothy Heppell

Dr Timothy Heppell is an Associate Professor of British Politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Cameron: The Politics of Modernisation and Manipulation (Manchester University Press) Email address: [email protected].

Thomas McMeeking

Dr Thomas McMeeking is a Teaching Fellow in British Politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of the The Political Leadership of Prime Minister John Major (Palgrave, 2020).

Notes

1 For a discussion on the degenerative tendencies of long-serving governments, see Heppell (2008a).

2 With the interpretation that voting behaviour was built around stable class-based cleavages being challenged, so academics advanced a competence-based (or valance) theory for voting choice in which governmental management of the economy and perceptions of leadership ability were identified as key determinants on perceptions of competence (Clarke et al., 2004, 2009).

3 For perspectives that suggest that we should not overestimate the importance of party leaders upon public opinion and voter choice, see Denver and Garnett, 2012. For discussions on leadership effects from a comparative perspective, see King, 2002; Bittner, 2012; and Costa-Lobo and Curtice, 2015.

4 From within the comparative studies literature on leadership selection (Cross and Blais, 2012; Pilet and Cross, 2014) the key research themes that have been under exploration include the following interconnected themes: leadership rules and who comprises the electorate (Kenig, 2009a; Cross and Blais, 2010); issues around how democratising selectorates impacts upon the competitiveness of contests (LeDuc, 2001; Kenig, 2009b); and debates around the ease with which incumbents can be challenged and removed (Weller, 2012).

5 The leadership of the Conservative Party has evolved through the following stages. First, up until 1965 they had no formal leadership selection procedures: a new party leader would emerge via processes of consultation amongst elites. Second, between 1965 and 1974 their rules involved a ballot of parliamentarians to participate if the leadership was vacant, i.e. via either death or resignation. Third, between 1974 and 1998 the ballots to select the party leader remained as from 1965, but now included the opportunity for the incumbent to be challenged for the leadership – i.e. the means by which Margaret Thatcher was challenged and was forced to step aside in 1990. Fourth, after 1998 they moved away from parliamentary ballots and a two-stage hybrid system was created in which parliamentarians engage in eliminative ballots and then present the leading two candidates to their membership to select from in a one-member, one vote ballot. This is the means by which Cameron was elected to the leadership in 2005 and how Johnson won the leadership in 2019. May won the eliminative parliamentary ballots stage but did not need to face a membership ballot, as her rival, Andrea Leadsom, withdrew after the parliamentary stage of the contest (Denham et al., 2020).

6 A recent example of the benefits of a leadership transition – and one close to a General Election – would be the New Zealand Labour Party in 2017. Their leader, Andrew Little, resigned that August, with the opposition Labour Party languishing in the opinion polls, and was replaced by Jacinda Ardern. In the subsequent October General Election, the Labour Party secured power, with their change in party leadership being identified as contributing to their rebranding and the broadening of their electoral appeal (Barrett, 2018).