A crisis of confidence in British party leaders?

Abstract

This article tests whether British party politics is experiencing a crisis of declining confidence in party leaders due to a media‐fed climate of denigrating politicians or whether there is simply a cyclical alternation of confidence in particular leaders, leaving unaffected an underlying equilibrium of confidence. The first section looks at approval of the prime minister since 1945 and for the alternative prime minister, the leader of the opposition; the second examines support for the parties that politicians lead; and the third section looks at the support for leaders in aggregate in order to see whether prime ministerial unpopularity is balanced by a rise in popularity for the leader of the opposition, as in the equilibrium model, or whether there is steadily falling popularity indicative of a crisis of confidence in party leaders as a group.