Personalization of Politics and Electoral Change

West European Politics, 2020

Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the ‘personalisation of politics’. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to dealignment. This article explores the longitudinal relationship between partisan dealignment, leader effects and party choice, through a novel dataset pooling 109 national election surveys collected in 14 Western European parliamentary democracies across the last six decades. The results show that leader effects increased over time as a function of the decline of party identification. Additional panel evidence from selected countries shows that partisan dealignment is responsible for increasing leader effects on party choice at the individual level. The longitudinal dimension of this study contributes to the most contested aspect of the personalisation of politics debate.

Electoral Studies, 2021

Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters' polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.

ECPR Press/Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021

Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters' behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media's growing tendency to portray politics in "personalistic" terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework - based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies - and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries. The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior.

This paper investigates the effects of the deep transformations undergone by West European parties in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall fall on their relationship with the electorate. Attention is devoted in particular to the changing content of individuals’ partisan attachments, which we hypothesize to have changed from a mere reflection of previous social and ideological identities to the result of individual attitudes towards parties and partisan objects. The main objective of this analysis is to show the nowadays prominent part played by voters’ attitudes towards one of these ‘objects’ – party leaders – in determining psychological attachments with the parties. We concentrate on the main two cleavage based parties in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands in the period between 1990 and the most recent election for which National Election Study data is available. By means of logistic regression analysis, it is shown the constantly declining ability of ‘identity’ items (e.g., social class, union membership, church attendance, region of residence) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the correspondingly growing part played by voters’ attitudes towards issues, performance evaluation, and party leaders – the latter having become nowadays of crucial relevance in each country under analysis.

The article provides an assessment of the most recent literature on political leadership by focusing on its effects on voters’ cognition and behavior, in the light of the ongoing personalization of politics. The changing role of political leaders in contemporary democracies is assessed through a perspective aimed at linking leadership theory and political science. One of the major consequences of the personalization of politics seems to lie in the changing expectations of voters with respect to the personal profile of their leaders. This is due to the lowering effects of television and parallel attempts by leaders to appeal voters on the basis of perceived similarities. As to the leaders’ effect on individual voting behavior, we highlight the various reasons that can enhance (or constrain) the role of party leaders’ image in the voting calculus. Implications and directions for further research are discussed in the concluding section.

Electoral Studies, 2012

The 'personalization of politics' hypothesis assumes that personalization takes place in election campaigns, in the mass-media, and in the calculus of voting. We claim that the distinction between person/leader and organization implicitly assumed by the personalization hypothesis does not capture how voters observe politics. In contrast, our hypothesis is that evaluation criteria regarding parties and leaders are not in competition but reinforcing. This hypothesis is investigated by looking at the relevance of party and leader evaluations for vote choice in the German Federal Elections in 1998Elections in , 2002Elections in , 2005Elections in , and 2009. The results show that party evaluation matter more than leader evaluation and, more importantly, a match of parties and their leaders with regard to general evaluations determine vote choice as good as single evaluations together.

This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main predictors as well as for the potential feedback stemming from the dependent variable. In the light of these considerations, a new ‘iron triangle’ of electoral research would seem to take shape, with partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote tight to each other by a strong link of reciprocal causation. Making use of pre-/post-election surveys from Britain and Italy, the empirical analysis provides evidence for a strong effect of past behavior on political attitudes. However, past behavior seems to exert its effect mainly on partisan attitudes, whereas party leader evaluations appear only slightly affected. The results point to the considerably weakened role of partisanship as attitudinal anchor of vote choice. Leader evaluations, on the contrary, emerge as a crucial component in the voting decision.

Electoral systems vary widely in the degree to which they encourage candidate-centric or party-centric patterns of competition. For example, some allow voters to choose among candidates from a single party, while others allow no such choice; some are used to elect individuals while others elect slates of individuals. We hypothesize that changes in electoral systems in recent decades should trend towards candidate-centrism and away from party-centrism – a process that we label ‘personalization’. We base this hypothesis upon two observations: that voters are becoming disengaged from and distrustful of political parties; and that voters’ attitudes can matter in shaping electoral reforms. Assessment of the hypothesis requires first that we clarify the concept of personalization, second that we develop our understanding of how various aspects of electoral systems affect personalization, and third that we gather empirical evidence on electoral reforms that increase or reduce personalization. We pursue each of these steps. Our empirical evidence is based on a new database of electoral reform in Europe since 1945.

When do candidate-centred electoral systems produce undisciplined parties? In this article, we examine party discipline under open-list proportional representation , a system associated with MPs cultivating personal constituencies. We present a model explaining how legislators' preferences and support among voters mediate political leaders' ability to enforce discipline. We show that disloyalty in candidate-centred systems depends on parties' costs for enforcing discipline, but only conditional on MP preferences. MPs who share the policy preferences of their leaders will be loyal even when the leaders cannot discipline them. To test the model's implications, we use data on legislative voting in Poland's parliament. Our empirical findings confirm that disloyalty is conditioned on party leaders' enforcement capacity and MP preferences. We find that legislators who contribute more to the party electorally in terms of votes are more disloyal, but only if their preferences diverge from the leadership. Our results suggest that the relationship between open lists and party disloyalty is conditional on the context of the party system.

European Journal of Political Research, 1998

The paper applies a structural perspective to the analysis of political preferences. Examining two British surveys, the 1987 cross-section of the electorate and a panel survey that covers the 1983 and 1987 elections, the research explores the bases of persistent voting for the same party, location on left-right scales, and the probability of holding the same policy views on a host of different issues over time. A set of structural variables rests at the heart of the paper's theory: discussion networks, patterns of interactions with members of political parties, social class networks, and location in the social structure. Several hypotheses guide the analysis: The effects of the structural variables on the probability of casting a ballot for the same political party in any one election and in adjacent elections will remain, even after controlling for party identification; political party socialization; location on left-right scales; positions taken on any and all political issues; age, and past levels of electoral stability. The effects of structural variables on left-right position will remain, even after controlling for locations on alternative left-right scales. Finally, reinforcing attitudinal context provides the only consistent determinant of stable policy positions, after controlling for a host of alternative explanations including level of education; age; interest in politics, and a general propensity to offer stable answers to political questions.

2014

For a long time the question of to what extent party choice in the European Parliament (EP) elections is primarily dependent on voters' orientations towards the European Union (EU) or just a mere reflection of orientations towards issues and actors in national politics has been debated. By combining insights from individual-level models of party choice in second-order elections with theories of sequential decision making this article investigates if, how and at what stages in the decision process attitudes to European integration matters for party choice. In line with previous work on first and second decision rule criteria in EP elections, this article develops and tests hypotheses about how voters' orientations work at different stages of the voter decision process. The findings, based on Swedish data from a probability-based threewave Internet campaign panel, indicate that many voters are in fact considering more than one party to vote for in the beginning of the election campaign. As expected, left-right orientations function as a main decision rule with respect to which parties voters even consider voting for, while proximity on the European integration dimension mainly matters as a second decision rule in the final stage of the decision process. Using a sequential model with consideration and choice stages, the article reveals a much larger complimentary effect of EU proximity on party choice than has generally been found in previous research. This serves as a distinct contribution to the emerging research field of individual party choice in second-order elections.

Modern representative democracies are often described as government by the consent of the governed rather than government by the people. Elections play a central role in this context and several theorists of modern democracy have struggled to determine the circumstances under which effective political representation can exist. One thing that is clear is that voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy positions are essential, since these views are important determinants of the outcomes of electoral processes and thus the extent to which voters are meaningfully represented in a political system. This book focuses on the agreement in voters’ perceptions of party positions and circumstances under which high levels of perceptual agreement can be obtained. The book contributes to existing research by addressing three sets of research questions. Firstly, the project draws the electoral and institutional context into the research on perceptions and perceptual agreement. Secondly, the research brings the political parties into the equation and thirdly, the study investigates how factors related to both individual voters and political parties interact with the institutional context and so affect voters’ perceptual agreement. The book draws on election study data from 34 countries in a total of 58 elections and is one of the most comprehensive comparative studies of voters’ perceptual agreement hitherto. Whereas earlier studies of the causes of perceptual agreement argued that perceptions of party positions among voters result mainly from endogenous individual level factors such as education, party sympathy and the ideological distance between parties and voters, this study shows that voters’ perceptions also are also affected by exogenous factors related to the electoral systems and the political parties. The book concludes that political representation, as defined by the responsible party model, seems to work best in multiparty parliamentary systems with proportional representation and a strong left-right dimensional structure, in which parties maintain stable and divergent policy positions.