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’.