Personalist Parties in Democracies

• In Event: Personalism

Abstract

This study introduces new, original data on political party personalism. We conceptualize party personalism as the extent to which parties are vehicles to advance leaders' personal political careers such that the leader has more control over the party than do other senior party elites, and compare this concept with related ones. After describing the measurement strategy and demonstrating measurement reliability and validity, we show the global and historical patterns of party personalism in the past three decades. We then use this measure to examine whether personalist parties shape two outcomes relevant to the quality of democracy: political polarization and citizen satisfaction with democracy. We show that when leaders backed by a personalist political party win power, political polarization increases; we do not find that party personalism influences citizen support for democracy, however. This suggests that political polarization is endogenous to party personalism. Our findings suggest that the election of leaders supported by personalist political parties sets in motion meaningful political changes, though not in all the domains observers have proposed. We close this study by discussing additional areas in which our data can be used in future research.

Authors

• Joseph Wright, Pennsylvania State University

• Erica Frantz, Michigan State University

• Andrea Herschman Kendall-Taylor

• Jia Li, Penn State University