Personalist Democracies

• In Event: Personalism

Abstract

This paper confronts the canonical understanding of modern democracy as “unthinkable save in terms of parties”. It shows that the global diffusion of elections and institutions for the separation of power has not led to the emergence of party-based electoral regimes everywhere, as the literature on the “efficiency” of political parties would predict. Instead, many democracies are “personalist”, i.e., dominated by short, small, and very unequal coalitions of ambitious politicians. To show that, I introduce a global measure of personalism in electoral regimes built upon some previously available and some newly collected data about world leaders, their personal and institutional backgrounds, and their practices in office. Additionally, I develop a formal model to show that, contrary to what the political economy of parties predicts, party-based democracies emerge only under the right conditions. Specifically, personalist democracies are more likely when the returns to scale of electoral alliances decrease, when the power asymmetry between the groups competing for power increases, when institutions reward individual politicians over their coalitions, and when policy positions are not salient. As I do so, I weave together well-established arguments about the deleterious effects of institutions like Presidentialism, or of the absence of well-established lines of political cleavage, and introduce new ideas such as the one that highlight the role of political inequality.

Author

• Fernando Bizzarro Neto, Harvard University