Measuring Personalism: Voting for a Populist Leader in Russia and Turkey

• In Event: Personalism

Abstract

Recent research on political leadership exercised by powerful individuals focuses on the charisma of their personalist appeal, the promises they make to mobilize the public, and the organizational weakening of the populist parties that they use as vehicles to gain power. Thus, conceptualizing personalist leadership and analyzing its role in the contemporary populist tide have received most of the attention in the literature devoted to this phenomenon. Yet, personalist leaders come to power through elections in which they are supported by political organizations. A significant body of literature establishes that the individual characteristics of a new “star” on the political horizon may attract numerous followers who feel disappointed and betrayed by the corrupt establishment, including political parties. It still remains uncertain, however, how uniform this surge is across political systems and for how long it can be maintained once the image of an “outsider” starts to wane. In particular, one puzzling question that warrants investigation is: What part of the electoral victories of a populist leader can be solely attributed to their personal vote-earning attributes?
It is commonly assumed that the key to personalist leaders’ success is their claim to rise above party politics, but in reality they need and seek an organization that would take care of the banal aspects of an election. At the same time, populists appealing to “the people” rather than just to one segment of the electorate, have the ambition to receive votes also from citizens who in general sympathize with other parties. Over time, however, the personal charisma wears out and as it fades, the relative importance of the leader’s organization for his own success may increase. Thus, the magnitude of a populist leader’s following autonomous from programmatic voting appears to be significant for the fate of the regime and for the speed at which democratic erosion may progress.
This study focuses on two populist personalist regimes, Russia and Turkey. These are two countries with different political-cultural legacies, both were part of the Third Wave of democratization and similar in the emergence of a powerful authoritarian leader, such as Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan. Using United Russia and the AKP (Justice and Development Party) for the purpose of passing important constitutional changes, Putin and Erdogan have managed to concentrate significant powers in the presidential institution. Preliminary evidence suggests that in both countries, notable groups of voters cast ballots in favor of the charismatic populist president even if they support another party in the legislative election. The size of these groups vary across space and time and this variation may be associated with certain contextual characteristics and the time a personalist leader has been in office.
The paper is organized in two parts. First, it develops a measure of personalist support to assess the rates of district level voting for a populist leader independent from that for his political party. This measure captures the existence of a gap in the amount of votes cast for the personalist leader in a presidential election and the votes cast for his party in the closest in time legislative election. Drawing upon extant research, my expectations are that social mobility reduces the amount of personalist voting; where there is less mobility – patron-client relationships flourish and personalism prevails. I also expect that levels of unemployment and the existence of deeper cleavages also affect the frequency of personalist voting. Finally, if there is a “fade away” effect, personalist voting should decrease over time. Second, in the empirical part these propositions are tested using data on the last three electoral cycles in Russia and Turkey. The data will be collected from the official sites of the Central Election Commissions and the national statistical institutions.

Authors

• Tatiana Kostadinova, Florida International University

• Dilara Hekimci, Florida International University