Abstract
The personalization of politics has been extensively studied from different angles and in different national contexts. Nonetheless, an easily comparable and longitudinal study of the personalization of politics at both the country and the party levels is still missing. In this article, we fill this gap by presenting data from an expert survey on the personalization of politics for around 110 parties and a series of Western European countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s. The dimensions analyzed concern the impact of the personalization of politics in general elections, and also party leaders' room for maneuver in candidate selection, the definition of the party's policy-making agenda, and party leaders’ intra-party control. Different reliability tests confirm the goodness of the data collected. At the same time, first descriptive analyses show that there has not been a homogenous diffusion of this phenomenon in Western Europe, and diverging personalization trends are present for different groups of countries or different dimensions of this phenomenon.
Highlights
The personalization of politics is probably not a new phenomenon
We present fresh data on the evolution of the personalization of politics in Western Europe between 1985 and 2016, from both a country- and a party-related perspective, using an expert survey (PoPES, Personalization of Politics Expert Survey) devised to tackle two specific areas of research: the impact of the personalization of politics, over time, in different countries and the importance of leaders within political parties
In this article, we focus on three subsequent questions, related to party leaders (Personalization in Candidate Selection; Personalization in Policy-Making; Personalization in Party Control), were: how would you evaluate the autonomy of party leaders in selecting candidates for General Elections? Please rate leaders’ autonomy on a 1-10 scale, where 1 means "very low autonomy" and 10 means “very high autonomy”
Summary
The personalization of politics is probably not a new phenomenon. To a large extent, the modern study of politics has grown by looking at the interactions between rulers and the whole political community. In the past few decades, the study of the personalization of politics has been at the center of lively scholarly interest Different aspects of this phenomenon have been investigated: the importance of leaders in the media (Farrell 1996; Mughan 2000; Kriesi 2011; Langer and Sagarzazu 2018); the power of party leaders (Blondel 1987; Blondel and Thiébault 2010) and chief executive leaders (Samuels and Shugart 2010); the increasing centrality of individual candidates in general elections (Renwick and Pilet 2016); the power of leaders in party organizations (Blondel and Thiébault 2010; Schumacher et al 2013; Schumacher and Giger 2017). The personalization of politics should be considered as a multifaceted concept (Rahat and Sheafer 2007; Adam and Maier 2010; Karvonen 2010; Balmas et al 2014; Rahat and Kenig 2018)
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